Future of Crystal Reports

As a long time Crystal Reports user I find myself increasingly frustrated. It seems like CR is being abandoned by SAP. I service packs on the support site are incomplete and more.

Maybe I am just not looking in the right places, but it seems to me there has been little reason to purchase any new version since CR 2008. Not much has been added as far as features and in fact its seems like the features have been reduced.

Does anyone have any idea where SAP is headed with Crystal Reports? Is it time to change reporting tools?

Just attended the SAP Insider conference in Las Vegas.  Bottom line.  No new features for Crystal Reports.  Continued support of the product for x number of years.

I am sad to hear that news. I wonder where this will take reporting? I can't see the need for it going away anytime soon.

Of course Webi is still alive and well.  They have not pushed Crystal Reports Enterprise too much, but they may in a few years.  A lot of push toward visualizations (Lumeria and Design Studio). 

Not long ago I had a conversation with a friend from SAP about this. He contacted the Crystal development team - they ARE working on Crystal 2016, but there's no official release date. I don't know whether there will be any new features other than support for newer database drivers, though.

-Dell

I will keep my fingers crossed for the new release. It hope its as complete as the 2008 version was.

I work for county government where the authorized reporting tool is Crystal. There are many employees in each agency of the county whose responsibility is to create a variety of reports for a variety of needs. Is there a better solution for this environment? If Crystal is dying then what options should we look at for the future. (With the amount of new, ad-hoc and reporting maintenance needs it will always be the same foundation as described)

Crystal Reports is not going away, just not being enhanced.  I also work for a county government.  But there are other options, depends on your reporting environment.  We are Crystal Reports shop for the most part.  We deploy most of Crystal Reports to a BI 4.0 installation (hope to be 4.1 sometime later this year).  But we do have some outside vendor applications that use Crystal Reports as there reporting tool.  Also we have one vendor and a number of our own programmers using Report Builder (in a Visual Studio environment).