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

CRM report types


Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 allows different types of reports; not only can the SQL Reporting Services reports be used, but other custom reports, such as Crystal Reports, ASP.NET, or Silverlight reports can also be integrated.

Dynamics CRM can manage the following types of reports:

  • RDL files, which are SQL Reporting Services reports

  • External links to external applications such as Crystal Reports, ASP.NET, or Silverlight reports

  • Native CRM dashboards with charts

The RDL files can be created in either of the following two ways:

  • By using the Report Wizard

  • By using Visual Studio

Dynamics CRM 2011 comes with 54 predefined reports out of the box; 25 of them are main reports and 29 are subreports. If for some reason you don't see any report as shown in the following screenshot, it means Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting Extensions were not installed. This is something that can only happen for on-premise environments; if you are working with CRM Online, you don't need to be worried about any report-extension-deployment tasks.