Microsoft provides a collection of "accelerators" for developers and CRM admins to jump start advanced Dynamics CRM customization.

Today, I will focus on the "Analytics" accelerator, though all accelerators are available at http://crmaccelerators.codeplex.com/

Background

This accelerator privides SQL Reporting Services (SRS) reports in an installation ready format as well as the code and basic instruction behind them.

The First thing to note is that the Analytics Accelerator is being released in three parts. As of this writing, the second release "Analytics R2" has just hit Codeplex.

• R1 - SQL 2005 Dashboards
• R2 - SQL 2008 Dashboards [AVAILABLE NOW]
• R3 - SQL Server Analysis Services Cubes, data mining

When R3 is available, 10 Types will post a follow up review on those additional functionalities.

NOTE TO SQL 2005 USERS:There is an as-yet uncorrected issue in the new R2 release in that the SRS reports for SQL 2005 released with R1 no longer work with SQL 2005, though there are new reports also provided that work with SQL 2008. At this point, the community is waiting for Microsoft to rebuild the provided SQL 2005 reports correctly, or re-release the R1 reorts, which include the correct SQL 2005 reports

Getting Started

Once you have downloaded the code, you will need to install the Reports into your CRM environment. Note that you will need CRM 4.0 and SQL Server 2008 correctly configured for web deployment and reporting. This is a good time to note that Microsoft has updated this Virtual PC (VPC) for CRM 4.0 and it is available to Microsoft Partners on Partnersource.

The provided documentation details the installation. If you have imported custom SRS reports, you will be familiar with the process. For reports with multiple graphs and tables, import the parent report first, then the sub-report and ensure that you link it to the parent report. Also check your CRM report's sharing permissions if you find other users unable to view the report.

Obviously, these reports are using data from your CRM DB so be sure to populate it with some reasonable data if you see that your reports are a bit uninteresting.

What is Provided

There are multiple reports provided that include some hypothetical reporting metrics for:

• Account Executive
• CRM Usage by Salesperson
• Sales Funnel
• Sales Manager
• Support Case Management

What to do

These SRS reports are provided with full customization possible through SRS Report Designer or Visual Studio, which I prefer. Some things you might want to try out once you have loaded them into Visual Studio:

• Check out the data soruce to populate your CRM with data to see the reports in action
• Create a gauge report using the Account Executive Dashboard as a model
• Change the data source on sub-reports
• Create your own custom "Traffic Light" report charting the red-yellow-green values of key data elements achieving certain threshholds.

Next Steps

• Look for the release of the Analytics R3 accelerator and review on 10 Types
• Look for our hands on code creation of a "Traffic Light" report

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