Altru Ideas

During our initial implementation of Altru, I had several members of the Blackbaud team tell me that Crystal Reports was an option for reporting out of Altru. We were transitioning from an POS/Scheduling software that had Crystal Reports built in, to which we would print daily and weekly scheduled event reports, including all programs and events for that time period.

It became apparent as we got started that the built in reports for both Group Sales Reservations and Scheduled Programs, weren't going to populate pertinent information for us, such as Important notes, resources, memo's in Documentation, etc. Going off of recommendations, we purchased a couple of licenses of Crystal Reports, and started down the path of queries and export definitions. The purpose of this post revolves around the output of those definitions, CSV and XLSX files. We simply need a better way to connect to our data. 

Using a straight text data connection, or ODBC to an XLSX file is extremely messy, with random fields losing mappings and fields being capped at 255 characters, when there are far more. 

Ideally, we could connect our CR to the back end, through a VPN tunnel using the site admin's credentials. This would give us live reporting options without the messy export, verify database, wait 20 minutes, fix field mappings, export report, wait 15 minutes, etc.

If direct connection isn't available, could it be packaged in a way that CR reads easier, such as an MDB file?

I'm all for a built in report builder if that could happen, or another way for us to pull data we need. OData doesn't exist for report definitions, and Tableau was suggested to me 2 months after we started testing.

I will do what is necessary to make sure my organization has the reports they need, and thus far our entire Altru team has been very helpful, but we're looking at moving Raisers Edge to Altru as well, which also uses Crystal Reports, which could potentially add many more hours of work to create which was already built in.

Thanks for any guidance.