Our WorkForce management software vendor is moving their reporting solution from Crystal Reports to Visual Studio and I have no clue about this stuff. Therefore, I am asking for any help / advice you can share with me.

We have been using Crystal Reports / Business Objects against an Oracle database to do custom reporting for the past several years and have upwards of 100 reports that we will need to convert as well as develop new ones going forward.

My main question which the software vendor has been unable to explain to me revolves around the fact that they have two flavors of report.

Standard Report - Uses RDL report templates and the RDLC engine
Advanced Report - Uses RDL templates and the SSRS engine.

What is the difference between RDLC and SSRS? How would I know which one to go with etc.?

Many thanks in advance!

In generalthe Report Server is preferred over ReportViewer control becauseit offers better scalability, more export formats, centralized storage and access control of reports, caching, subscriptions etc etc.However if you want disconnected use then use the ReportViewer control. Ifyou want to report off ofbusiness objects that are internal to your application then one way to do that isto use ReportViewer control. Or if you want to customize the parameter prompting for your report then you may want to use ReportViewer.