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Hello everyone!
I'm relatively new to the reporting aspect of CRM, and I'd like to get some opinions on how to best approach this.
I'm aware of the process in regards to creating a report with the Report Wizard inside the CRM. However, it appears to be rather limited in regards to the actual design of the report. What are my options here? Ideally, I would like to have something automated and sent to specific users VIA email every month.
As stated in the title, we are currently using Dynamics 2016 On-Prem
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This is some fantastic insight that I need to sort through! Thanks again everyone
Hi Pete,
Lot of good suggestions by other members. Here's my 2 cents worth :).
There are many options in Dynamics 365 for reporting and each option can be used depend on your use case.
1. Views - Preconfigured, Simple and easy to use and can export to Excel if you like.
2. Advanced Find - Similar to Views but you can define your own filter criteria
3. Word and Excel Templates - New feature and great for relatively simple reports - www.microsoft.com/.../create-word-and-excel-templates-from-dynamics-365-data.aspx
4. Report Wizard - As your found have limitations but better than Views
5. Custom SSRS - As Jason suggested, better to stick with FetchXML. More flexibility and suitable for complex reports
6. Third Party add-ons - Xperido, DocumentCorePack are some add-ons which provides automation features and can be used to easily produce more complex reports. Feature set is better than Views, Report Wizard, Advanced Find.
www.xperido.com/.../xperido-microsoft-dynamics
www.mscrm-addons.com/.../DocumentsCorePack
7. Power BI - Great for complex visualizations and dashboard
Hi Pete,
You are right, 'Report Wizard' reports are easy to build but have a lot of limitations in terms of design & output both. But the basic of purpose of these reports is to power each user to be able to build report.
For Advanced Reporting options, like you want to send out the reports to users via email....you might have to design a SSRS report and a plugin to send them.
Here are some URLs to help you with:
crmbook.powerobjects.com/.../advanced-reporting-options
technet.microsoft.com/.../dn920281.aspx
community.dynamics.com/.../105090
Send report:
www.powerobjects.com/.../report-scheduling-and-email-subscription-in-crm-2011
community.dynamics.com/.../220663
www.crmsoftwareblog.com/.../crm-workflow-email-crm-report-pdf-attachment
It all depends on what you or your development team are capable of. If you are a system customizer and don't code, I would suggest using SSRS to write the report. But this doesn't automate the creation of the report and distribution.
If the report is not too crazy (layout could be built in html) and you know how to develop workflow activities or plugins then you could take a different approach to make it automated. You would need to create an html layout and in a workflow activity you could do the following.
1. Use handlebars.net to populate an html template with the data.
2. Use pdfsharp to generate a pdf from the html.
3. Create an email for the various users using the email entity.
4. Attach the pdf to the email(s) and send the email(s).
You can build a workflow that runs every month (with a timeout) that calls the workflow activity. I have done this in the past and it has worked well but the client needed to send hundreds of emails to their clients and if you aren't sending a bunch of emails it may be overkill and not worth the effort.
If you need more help or guidance reach out and I would be happy to help.
Hope it helps, Good luck.
Hi,
For report design you can use Visual studio. you can download rdl file from CRM and format your report as per your requirement, and add formatted report to CRM.
To send report to specifi users via email, you can use workflow.
Here are some links which will help you
community.dynamics.com/.../157425
www.crmsoftwareblog.com/.../crm-workflow-email-crm-report-pdf-attachment
www.crmsoftwareblog.com/.../microsoft-dynamics-crm-report-scheduler
You'd probably want to go down the SQL Reporting road. Since you're on premise you can use SQL to query the database but if you're even planning to move online, stick with FetchXML.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328097(v=crm.8).aspx
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