On the 7th day of CRM Dynamics gave to me…7 ways to analyze data

Yea, CRM holds data.  CRM holds the relationships between that data.  Here’s some great ways to analyze and consume this in CRM.

Charts- you’ve got built in charts.  You’ve got custom charts using a designer.  You’ve got custom charts that you can import into your org.  Pretty, multi-series charts.

Dashboards-  Command central.  Take charts, custom views, toss in an iframe, maybe a xap web resource and this page can hold about anything you’d want it to.  There’s always someone who wants to SEE the data, all rolled up into a pretty dashboard, their title usually begins with the letter C.

Advanced find- So it took a little convincing that this could be considered analyzing your data.  But, here’s how I came around.  First, build your query to see exactly what you want returned on the list, now save it, export the fetch and build a report out of it.  This keeps data for you in a nice clean way, that is not in your face and cluttering your UX.

System reports- The team gave us several out of the box reports for system entities.  Great stuff on sales pipelines, account demographics, and so on.

Report wizard custom reports- So the system reports are great, but they don’t cover everything.  The report building wizard is great, you can make custom reports without using custom code.  Nothing wrong with those code-writing folks, but this won’t require them.

SSRS reports- So the built in ones aren't enough AND you’re in an on-premise deployment?  SSRS is the way to go.  You get unions, more graphics and features that just aren't there in the built-in ways.  You probably want a coder here, or at least someone with a bit deeper tech skills.

Fetch xml reports- this is a great answer from the product team for deeper custom reports than you can get with the wizard, but keeps the behind the scenes data (since it’s a hosted multi-tenant) of the CRM Online client secure.  Not quite as robust as SSRS, but certainly more than in the wizard.

Preview for day 8…8 years of CRM experience

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