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Figure 1 – “Welcome to Management Reporter” page complete with report definition sample reports
In my last blog, Five Reasons To Upgrade To Management Reporter 2012, I said that I would talk about the experiences that we had with migrating FRx reports to Management Reporter 2012. Generally, the experience has been good. Some tweaks have to be made to reports – short cuts like creating dimension sets to use in row calculations – may need to be added.
Some of the feature differences to watch for are noted below, with a brief discussion of the feature and the solution.
1. Publishing in Excel
At first glance, it seems that you cannot open the reports that you are publishing in Excel, as you were able to do in FRx. In Management Reporter, the reports are published to Report Viewer. However, you still have the option to open any report in Excel when it is published to any location outside of the Management Reporter Report Viewer. If you publish a report to the network or to SharePoint, the report can be opened directly in Excel. Or, in Report Viewer, the report can be exported to Excel. Security in Management Reporter makes accessing the reports more secure.
2. FRx Effective Dates
FRx allows the choice of effective dates when choosing reports in the report Catalogue. This choice is currently NOT available in Management Reporter 2012. This is a suggestion for future releases. The solution for now is to create different reports with the required date options.
3. Rounding Limits
In FRx, if the Rounding Limit is exceeded, a warning pop up as the report generates. The user has the option to cancel the report. In Management Reporter, the warning is included in the report queue status and the Report Viewer is loaded on top of this. The user does not immediately know that there was a problem. He or she may print the report, email it to others, etc. In the best case, the user sees the warning after closing the report viewer and realizes that all the work of printing, etc. was wasted effort. Users have already suggested to Microsoft that the same option that is in FRx be added to Management Reporter 2012.
4. Security Restricted by Reporting Tree
This works the same way as it did in FRx. Security can be set up in the Reporting Tree Dimension to restrict each reporting unit to the users (or groups of users) who can access that reporting unit. As in FRx, you can specify a Reporting Unit for each column in the Column Definition.
Some great resources:
1. The following links come from the blog – Dynamics Corporate Performance Management
2. Microsoft FRx® to Management Reporter 2012 Migration Guide
Some planning is required for the migration. In some cases, creating new reports is also an option, using the FRx reports as a guideline. This is also a good opportunity to cull those old reports that no one uses. When you are designing the reports, it is helpful to decide whether you are measuring the overall performance of the company and its people, or whether you are measuring, objectively, that the performance of the company is meeting the strategies laid out by the management team. As we know, nothing in business is static for long.
Judy
Judy@esicanada.com
www.esicanada.com
Etelligent Solutions - Edmonton, Calgary ERP and CRM