Thoughts on Convergence 2014 Day 1 - Part II

In the first part of this series, I talked a little bit about how the Dynamics Business suite fits into Microsoft's overarching plan of delivering innovation to the customer, and also discussed some details on the Dynamics CRM roadmap specifically with the Spring and Autumn updates. One constant theme of Day 1 of Convergence 2014 was on products delivering amazing customer experience regardless of the channel they use.

CRM 2011 Queue History Report

While working with a recent prospect, there was a very interesting report that they wanted to recreate in Dynamics CRM. The report would give details of the time the object (in this case incident) spent in each queue. For example, if incident "Incident_xyz" was in queue "A" for 5 minutes, and then was moved to queue B 20 minutes ago, then the report should show the time spend in each queue.

CRM 2011 SSRS Drill down reports

While the CRM 2011 OOB report wizard will suffice in many cases, there are specific reasons to go the custom SSRS route. In this post, I will talk you through the creation of a drill down report using a summary table.

Requirement:
Create a summary table of the number of incidents categorized by Subject. The incident count should list the incidents, and the user should be able to open the individual incident by clicking on the ticket number

Why Microsoft bought MarketingPilot for Dynamics CRM

According to Gartner analyst Laura McLellan, by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs. Gartner’s annual marketing budget research (for 2013) with high-tech providers also found increased budgets in every type of provider, in every geography, and every size of provider.

CRM 2011 rsProcessingAborted error when running custom reports

Have you had a situation where the default reports in CRM 2011 and reports created from VisualStudio work, but reports created from the Report Wizard (or any Fetch based reports) result in a rsProcessingAborted error?

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.

Dashboard Reporting Control for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Dashboard reporting control is available in Dynamics Marketplace and is distributed for no charge by Microsoft. Using this managed solution, reports can easily be added to the dashboard. The only piece of information you need is the report id, which tells the dashboard which report to display. Very nice!

Here is the link for the Dashboard Reporting Control in Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace.
http://dynamics.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-us/applications/dashboard-reporting-control-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-12884910688

CRM 2011 Online Reports with FetchXML

One of the great benifits of CRM 2011 is the ability to create custom reports in SSRS using FetchXML. You have much more control over formatting and grouping. Additionally, you can add custom logos to your report! Who woudn't want that! :)

Before you start, you need to have BIDS installed. BIDS is available as part of SQL Server Install, and is not available free.
Secondly, install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Report Authoring Extension.


Once you have the above completed, you are ready for building your custom report. The use case is to create a report for an entity that tracks orders that have been shipped in the last x months, and greater than X dollars. We want to group it by Account, and by revenue.

Here are the steps: