Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Ian — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:28:00 GMT

I had a look at the CRM reports and using SQL reporting for CRM is much better than using the Crystal, can you give me some pointers on using it with our real CRM data rather than the sample data and the same goes for the Exchange reports, how do you get the reports to run on the real data?

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Matthew Stephen — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 19:56:00 GMT

The CRM database is very similar to the Microsoft CRM database. I can't help you with your particular CRM package, except to say you'll need to find a suitable OLEDB or ODBC provider to talk to it; you'll need to speak to your vendor to help you with that.
The Exchange report pack gives you a link in the readme to the vendors website where you can purchase, or trial an application to pump data out of exchange into the sample schema provided. Alternatively you can use ADO and the Exchange OLEDB provider to get the data yourself.

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Ian — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:08:00 GMT

We are using MS CRM 1.2, so I should be able to point the reports to the CRM server?

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Matthew Stephen — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 19:40:00 GMT

Thanks Ian
From the readme,
"You can use the sample reports as templates for designing new reports. With the reports in this pack, you can take the report definition files and, with only some minor configuration changes, have them work against your existing Microsoft CRM environment. If you choose to use these reports against your existing Microsoft CRM application, be aware that they bypass the Microsoft CRM application security layer and will require the user to have SQL access privileges to all views and tables in the Microsoft SQL Server database that contains the Microsoft CRM data.
"
So in prnciple the answer is yes - however I'm not sure exactly what changes are required. I don't have MS CRM installed - perhaps you could give it a go and let us know how you get on?

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Ian — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 19:22:00 GMT

Thanks for the tips, I have got it working by just changing the connection string.
The hard part now is working out which fields to use.
Great product!

re: Reporting Services : 21 Report packs released to the web for free download

Byron-Paul Mayne — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:49:00 GMT

Very good commentaries

Two new free SQL Server Reporting Services Report Packs released for IIS and Great Plains

Mat Stephen's WebLog — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:27:32 GMT

From the blog hits I received the last time I posted some info on free report packs available for SQL...