Business Intelligence for CRM 2011 data- Part II - PowerView

In Part I of the two part series, I had talked a little bit about the cool things that can be done with the Excel add on called PowerPivot, with the data feed coming in from a crm 2011 organization. In Part II, we are going to dive in to Power View, which is a browser-based Silverlight application launched from SharePoint  that enables users to present and share insights through interactive presentations.

Business Intelligence for CRM 2011 data- Part I - PowerPivot

In a typical CRM system, there might be huge quantities of data (like case items) that we would want to gain insight into. In the first part of a two part series, I will focus on using PowerPivot to connect to a CRM system, extract data, and present the data in powerful new ways using Excel.

PowerPivot is a powerful data mashup and data exploration tool based on xVelocity in-memory technologies providing unmatched analytical performance. The goal of PowerPivot is to empower users of all levels with new insights through familiar tools, which in this case is Excel.

Integrate Dynamics CRM 2011 with Sharepoint Foundation 2010

Once we have Sharepoint (either server or foundation) installed, we can then integrate it with crm 2011. Some things to keep in mind before we start:

1. Install the crm 2011 list component for sharepoint, if you want your documents in crm to look and feel like they belong in crm. Without it, sharepoint will show up like an iframe with url pointing to your document library.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5283
2. You can have a single org point to multiple sharepoint sites. The corollary is true too: a single sharepoint site can be referenced by multiple orgs. This assumes the right user permissions.
3. You can enable document management for out of the box and custom entites.
4. A single entity (say account), can point to multiple folder locations in the same sharepoint site. For example, one location would have all the account invoices, another folder the account's orders, etc.

Here are the steps to do the integration:

Install sharepoint foundation 2010 on win 7

Finally, I was able to get Dynamics CRM 2011 play nice with Sharepoint Foundation (SF) 2010. I think the hiccup was due to me getting SF2010 installed on my windows 7 machine, rather than on a server.

This link has ALL the information you need to install SF on win 7.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869%28office.14%29.aspx

Pay particular attention to the following:
1. Extract the files using cmd prompt, rather than use tools like winrar.
eg: c:\SharePointFiles\SharePoint /extract:c:\SharePointFiles
2. Edit the config file to allow installation from win 7 machine
3. In "Turn Windows Feature on or off", select the right values from the screenshot.

The above were the things I did not pay much attention to, and thus was scratching my head trying to figure out what happened. Hope you learn from my mistakes!

Once SF2010 is set up, it is pretty straightforward to hook it up with crm 2011. I will follow up with another post for that.