Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting

By : Damian Hernan Sinay
Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting

By: Damian Hernan Sinay

Overview of this book

All of the data entered into a CRM means nothing if it is unable to report the important information to our managers and executives in such a way that they can easily and quickly get the results they need. A better reporting system would enable them to make the necessary improvements to the processes that any business needs in a dynamic business world.For users and developers wishing to take advantage of using the report capabilities of Dynamics CRM, this is the book for you. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting is a practical and excellent reference guide that provides you with a number of different options you can use to create and empower the Reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM. This will give you a good grounding in using the reports in your Dynamics CRM 2011 implementations. This book looks at all the different options we can use to create reports in Dynamics CRM 2011, starting with SQL Reporting Services and custom reports, created in either CRM Report Wizard, SQL Report Builder, or Visual Studio. It will also show other options we can use such as dashboards, charts, and different ways to optimize and automate reports.We will also learn how to build our own reports either using the different wizards for basic reports or using Visual Studio for more complex reports. We will explore the options mobile CRM users have who want to run and see reports on these mobile devices.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Advanced report automation (programmatically)


If we want to run a CRM report automatically from a custom application such as a Windows or ASP.NET web application, we can do it programmatically as we will see in this chapter.

Before creating a solution in Visual Studio, we need to be sure that we can access our report externally by publishing it for external use. To do that we need to go to the CRM web interface and then to the reports. Find the report we want to automate and click on the Edit button from the ribbon. In our example we will use Account Summary (out of the box) report. When the Edit report dialog is open, go to the Actions menu and select the Publish Report for External Use menu option.

Clicking this option will not return any resultant message. To check whether it is published successfully, we will need to run the Report Manager web application and then go to the folder of our organization. There we will need to validate if we have a report with the report name there, as shown...