PowerObjects Microsoft CRM Blog

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides a rich reporting architecture built on SQL Server Reporting Services 2005. With all the features provided in Dynamics CRM 3.0, the new Report Wizard Tool has been added to CRM 4.0. This tool is for Business users in specific. With a few simple steps users can create reports needed to fulfill their job responsibilities and share it with others. The report wizard will allow customers to analyze their data by creating and editing new reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM or by customizing an existing report created with the report wizard. The report wizard will allow business users to:

1. Group data
2. Summarize data
3. Present data in tables, graphs, and charts
4. Print without exporting to Excel

Another out-of-box feature in CRM 4.0 is the Activity Report. An activity report has been added to support the needs of sales and service users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For those in sales or sales management, it will provide information on such things as the number of customer contacts in a given period of time, or the total number of outgoing telephone calls by all representatives in a manager’s territory. For service teams, it makes it easy to access data on the total number of interactions required to resolve a case, or the number of e-mails created by a case.

Some users prefer to generate report using Advanced Find so here is good news for them. Advanced Find has also been improved. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, you were only able to display columns from one record type. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, you can add columns from the related entities. This change provides the user with another layer of information.

Export to Excel reports has also been improved. After a user has exported data to Microsoft Excel, he or she may want to add additional columns to his or her spreadsheet. Although it was possible to do this using Edit Query, this is not the best user experience. Now it is possible to add additional Microsoft Dynamics CRM data to a spreadsheet without having to recreate the spreadsheet from scratch.

The new features in Excel are available when the Microsoft Office client is installed. The Microsoft Office client includes the Addin for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel.

Currently, the user cannot export data from multiple entities while maintaining his or her relationships. For example, if a sales manager wants to view all opportunities and the accounts they are related to, he or she needs to manually export the data from the different entities separately, and then join data together in Excel. Now it is possible to export data from many:1 and 1:1 related records directly to Excel.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) 2000 are not supported in CRM 4.0. In Dynamics CRM 4.0, a Connector is used to access Reporting Services. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) is a service that connects the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server computer to the Microsoft SQL Reporting Services computer. The connector eliminates the double authentication that was required for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 deployments where Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services was installed on a separate computer.

Developers can use BI Studio to create complex reports.