At a Glance
Industry Higher Education
Organization A leading educational university in Texas, USA
Migration SAP Crystal Reports 2020 → TIBCO Jaspersoft Studio 6.14.0
Challenge Moving 750+ reports without rebuilding them manually or losing years of business logic and formatting
Scope 750+ reports migrated over 13 months
Approach Automation-led migration using the DataTerrain Automated Conversion Engine

A LEADING UNIVERSITY IN TEXAS

Migrating Crystal Reports to Jaspersoft for a Leading University in Texas

Customer Background

A Texas university with years of accumulated Crystal Reports

Our client, a leading educational university in Texas, had built its reports over several years in SAP Crystal Reports across its finance, admissions, administration, and research departments. It needed a business intelligence platform that was easy to maintain, cost-effective, and scalable.

As licensing and maintenance costs grew and rigid formatting made reports harder to manage, the university's IT team adopted Jaspersoft, a modern, embeddable, open-source BI platform. It partnered with DataTerrain to automate the migration of more than 750 reports from SAP Crystal Reports 2020 to TIBCO Jaspersoft Studio 6.14.0, completing the work on time with pixel-perfect accuracy and minimal manual effort.

Customer Storeis
The Challenge

Retiring years of Crystal Reports technical debt at scale

Built over several years, the university's Crystal Reports environment had become a hard-to-maintain source of technical debt. Several issues stood out:

Technical Debt from Legacy Reports

Reports built over several years across multiple departments had become increasingly hard to maintain and update.

High Licensing and Maintenance Costs

Keeping the legacy Crystal Reports environment running carried significant licensing and support overhead.

Rigid Formatting

Inflexible report formatting hindered visual consistency across departments.

Complex Subreport Structures

Heavily nested subreports caused performance bottlenecks and slowed report delivery.

No Embeddable, Self-Service Reporting

Crystal Reports lacked the embeddable, self-service features a modern BI platform provides.

Migration at Scale

With 750+ reports in use, rebuilding them manually from scratch would have been slow and risked losing years of business logic and formatting.

Our Approach

DataTerrain's automated, five-phase migration

DataTerrain used its proprietary automation engine to streamline the entire Crystal Reports-to-Jaspersoft conversion, significantly reducing manual effort and accelerating delivery without compromising quality. The project ran over 13 months in five structured phases:

1
Discovery and Requirement Gathering

The team worked closely with the university's IT leadership to assess the existing Crystal Reports environment and define requirements, milestones, and governance standards.

2
Environment Provisioning and Automation Configuration

DataTerrain set up the source (SAP Crystal Reports 2020) and target (TIBCO Jaspersoft Studio 6.14.0) environments against a mirrored Oracle 19c database and configured the automated conversion engine.

3
Report Conversion and Enhancement

The DataTerrain engine converted the 750+ reports in bulk and applied custom enhancements uniformly: automatic frame removal from main reports and subreports, subreport margin elimination for better layout integration, and a consistent naming convention that appends _SUB01 to subreports for easy identification and maintainability.

4
Testing and QA Validation

Validated every migrated report for data accuracy and visual consistency against its legacy Crystal Reports original.

5
Deployment to Production

The team deployed validated reports to the university's production instance with full version control, tracked milestones, and resolved issues in close collaboration with university stakeholders.

Technology landscape

From Crystal Reports to a standardized Jaspersoft stack

Migrated From Crystal Reports (.rpt files)
Migrated To JasperReports (.jrxml templates)
Migrated From Frames and subreport margins that limit layout flexibility
Migrated To Automatic frame and margin removal for cleaner, consistent design
Migrated From Complex subreport structures
Migrated To Streamlined subreports with a consistent _SUB01 naming convention
Migrated From Oracle 19c data source
Migrated To Oracle 19c data source mirrored in the Jaspersoft environment
Migrated From Licensed, rigid reporting platform
Migrated To Open-source, embeddable BI with no legacy licensing overhead
Business Impact

Outcomes That Mattered to the Business

100% Data Fidelity

Every migrated report was validated for data accuracy and visual consistency against its legacy Crystal Reports original.

Automation at Scale

Automated Crystal Reports-to-Jaspersoft conversion applied the same enhancements across 750+ reports, saving significant time compared with manual reformatting and keeping years of business logic intact.

Performance and Scalability

Pixel-perfect layouts with streamlined report structures across departments, plus better scalability and performance from Jaspersoft's open architecture.

Lower Cost and Control

Eliminating legacy licensing overhead reduced total cost of ownership, while easier maintenance gives the university complete control over its BI environment.

On Schedule

The 750+ report migration was completed over 13 months, on schedule.

Bottom Line

Why Choose DataTerrain

Using its automated Crystal Reports to Jaspersoft migration approach, DataTerrain converted 750+ reports for a leading Texas university in 13 months, with 100% data fidelity, pixel-perfect layouts, and a lower total cost of ownership, without rebuilding a single report from scratch. Backed by 17+ years and 400+ clients in BI migration, including universities, healthcare networks, and enterprises, DataTerrain's any-BI-to-any-BI framework spans Crystal Reports, OBIEE, Cognos, and SSRS to Jaspersoft, Power BI, Tableau, and Looker.

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"DataTerrain's migration solution helped us retire legacy BI infrastructure without losing a single insight. The reports look the same, but now perform better, cost less, and are easier to manage." Director
Leading Texas University