FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

How does your price for report conversions compare with others?

You might find others who offer a lower price to automatically convert your Crystal Reports to SSRS, but their conversion quality is much lower. Our conversions are the most accurate in the business. Our conversions results mean that our customers save time, effort and money compared to any other conversion service available. Even the most complex Crystal Reports are converted to SSRS precisely. For example, Blue Cross of Louisiana tried the same report with us and others. Ours could run almost immediately. Report data and pagination was all good. While it took more than one day to make other conversion run, and pagination was still wrong.

What is the quality of your conversions?

Crystal Migration Services offers the most comprehensive conversion of Crystal Reports to SSRS. Our conversion engine is the only one that can automatically convert such as advanced Crystal features such as crosstabs, field highlighting, section coloring, specified order grouping, hierarchical grouping, and complicated formulas precisely. No one matches the quality of our conversions. And we can have the conversions back to you without delay.

Do you provide free sample conversions?

Yes, we do! To see how good our report conversions are, just send us one of your typical Crystal Reports to support@crystalmigrater.com. Please use your company email address or provide your company name when you send in your request. We will convert it to SSRS and send it back to you right away. No charge. And we are confident you will be impressed.. For example, how many reports do you want to convert, and how soon do you need them completed. Your report will be kept confidential. We do not do sample conversion for personal email address. If you need sample conversion more than one report, please contact us.

How long does it take to get the sample conversion back?

Your Crystal Report will be converted to SSRS using our Advanced Automatic Conversion engine, which takes less than a second. We are on Pacific Time zone (PST) so during our business hours you should have the report back within an hour. After hours it may take a bit longer but you should have your converted report returned to you next day at the latest.

Why do we need a WebEx Meeting with you?

After you receive the sample conversion, you may still have questions on how our conversion works, how to make the converted report up and running. Fortunately, Crystal Migration Services specializes in helping its customers work through all types of issues in a report migration project. A short WebEx, no more than an hour, would be helpful to answer any questions you might have. We are always eager to hear your feedback about our conversions.

What is provided with your Advanced Automatic Conversion? 

We convert your Crystal Reports to SSRS using our best in the business conversion engine, customized for your types of reports. Even advanced features of Crystal are converted accurately. We will provide you with a Scope of Work to explain what level of service you should expect. Some individual reports might need some minor tweaks. Changes for those individual reports are the customer's responsibility. But don't worry, our consultants can provide you with suggestions and guidance to make it easy for you. At your option you can also get additional consulting services from us to bridge any technical gaps, speed up the migration project, or offload time and effort from your staff to ours.

What is provided with your Full Service option? 

While our Advanced Automatic Conversion is the most comprehensive report conversion service available, there might be some individual report refinements that are needed before they can be deployed. Some of our customers prefer Crystal Migration Services to take over the whole report migration project, including modifying and rewriting reports as required. All the customer needs to do is test and deploy. Ask us to provide you with a customized quote for your project.

Do you need our database to do a full conversion?

A test database is not mandatory, and we do not ask our customers to send us a computer or a sample test database before we start a full conversion. We have customers who are very sensitive about the privacy of their data and we have procedures and standards to maintain the security of their data if we do need to access it. If a test database cannot be provided, will work closely with the customer during their testing phase. There's some additional cost when doing a conversion this way, but it's still much lower than our competitors.

What is the Difference between RDL and RDLC? 

rdl is for Report Server, while rdlc is for client reporting. You may use rdlc as a local report with .NET code, and you do not need the report server. From the conversion point of view, there is almost no difference between rdl and rdlc. You may just rename the rdl extension to "rdlc". With the reportveiwer in local model, you can use rdl the same way as rdlc. The only exception is, if there is subreport, rdlc must be the SSRS report extension.

How to use converted rdl in .NET? 

Some customers will use the converted reports in .NET. For winform, please check this site.

http://www.crystalmigrater.com/viewssrsreport.html

For asp.net, please check this site for details.

http://www.crystalmigrater.com/websubreport.html

How to Create Crystal Like SSRS Reports? 

Cusotmers who change their report platform from Crystal Reports to SSRS, they may want to create Crystal style SSRS reports. This site shows how to do this with Microsoft Report Builder.

http://www.crystalmigrater.com/crystallikereport.html 

Do you offer consulting services? 

Yes, we do. It is our mission to help you make your report migration project a success from start to finish. We are experts in Crystal Reports, .NET and Report Services.

Do you support SSRS 2005? 

Yes, we can convert your reports to SSRS 2005 format. Our default conversion format is SSRS 2008 R1. We support any version of SSRS including SSRS 2005 and after.

Where do I download Report Builder 3.0? 

You can use the embedded report designer in Visual Studio to edit the converted rdl file, but Report Builder 3.0 is better tool to fix any issues since you do not need to associate the rdl with any winform or asp.net to run the report. Report Builder is more user friendly, and it can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft site.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=6116