CRM Report Levels in CRM 3.0 and 4.0 (Comparison)

Dynamics CRM Reporting levels overview in 3.0 and 4.0

We see 3 core levels of reporting in MS CRM as we explain it to clients and prospects. It mostly revolves around need and data model and also complexity.

1. The Grid views are your first level of reporting out of CRM. In version 3.0 these were primarily for single entity reporting but you can also create a relationship to another entity and draw that primary attribute into the grid view. So it will allow you limited cross-entity reporting in 3.0. Grid Views do not give you a lot of flexibility to run calculations etc. They do display a lot of great info and give a ton of ability to filter and query entity info in CRM. You can also query and filter based on cross entity attributes BUT in Version 3.0 you cannot Display a lot of other entity attributes in CRM like many clients want to. In version 4.0 you can query on many entities and attributes and also pull in many entities and attributes into one grid view. This is a huge improvement from 3.0.

2. Exporting to Excel using Dynamic Pivot tables and queries allows you an amazing, almost SRS like capability. You can then save these XLS files and load them into the Report Manager like an SRS report. You can even manually edit the queries in Excel to bring in CROSS Entity reporting like in SRS. This Dynamic Excel connection and the ability to load it into CRM Report manager and maintain security roles etc is amazing. It puts powerful db querying into the realm of familiar office products. Great stuff.

3. SRS - SQL Reporting Services - Over the last 10 years MS SQL Server has become the premier DB Server for the rest of us. SRS layers sophisticated Reporting and BI on top of this db and enables the connection to virtually any other db or flat file you might ever want to connect to! SRS and Visual Studio combined together provide rich and powerful reporting features that can be loaded into CRM in the report manager to provide easy 'pre-filtering' and maintain roles based security. Once again, GREAT STUFF! Problem here is that you have to learn and master VS application methodologies which can be daunting. MSFT CRM will have to come up with an easy to use reporting tool in the future that allows the same easy to admin controls that CRM does. Once they have this it will be easier for clients to embrace reporting. CRM has such great admin features it is sad that they stop at the SRS reports and VS etc. In CRM LIVE you will not be able to load custom RDL files (SRS reports) into it. You will be limited to the reports that come native. RDLs could hold nefarious (Bad) code and virus that would potentially damage the server. Not good. They may enhance this in the future. This is a major limitation to CRM LIVE. Many clients really leverage this powerful reporting suite for cross system and entity reports and or quotes etc.

Hope that helps explain the levels of reporting in CRM based on need and complexity.
Microsoft just sent out a link to a nice area that covers some powerful explanations of CRM reporting.

Check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/using/reporting/default.mspx
Jon Petrucelli - http://www.productivegap.com/