Migration Tools – Good or Bad?
Last year, we posted a comparison of Crystal and SSRS on our website. Given the number download requests we received, it’s clearly front of mind for many people. Some third parties also contacted us with tools to migrate Crystal reports into SSRS. I haven’t taken a deep look at them. Here’s why:
Regular readers know I’m not a software-centric guy – a philosophy captured by our slogan, “The reports you need from the software you already have.” So, I don’t really get the idea of migration tools. Migration tools imply everything’s working fine – you just need a different kind of software. And I don’t get that. Unless your going to save an absolute fortune on licensing costs, it doesn’t make sense to change tools if everything’s working fine.
If you are going to change tools, that’s the perfect time to ask yourself whether you need all the reports you have. You should also consider whether the logic in the reports should be pushed back into the database as a views or even a data mart.
The point is this – changing tools is a lot of work. With a migration tool, you’ll be tempted to replicate all the good, bad and the ugly from your current system, which is not the way to get ROI from the work you’ve put into it.
It doesn’t make sense to change tools without looking at your reports first. Take the time to understand what’s really going on before replicating what you already have.
