Authored by Mark Harrington - Consultant - Wipfli's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team
One of the most rewarding aspects of the consulting world is when you are able to provide a tool that allows a user to make their critical business decisions more quickly.
For years many organizations have utilized the same static, periodic reports to drive these important decisions, and could be missing out on the evolution that is taking place in the Business Intelligence community.
There are many great Business Intelligence products on the market today which allow users to be more hands on with their data Analysis. One of the most overlooked and underrated tools in this market space is SQL Server Reporting Services.
Adding some user prompted Parameters to any SSRS Report can allow you to develop highly dynamic dashboards from your SQL data sources.
Below is a screenshot of a recent example of a simple parameterized report that I developed for our internal Service Center team using MIcrosoft Dynamics CRM:
The report shows details related to Support Cases that have been entered into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
The parameters that were added to the top of the Report Viewer window allow the user to easily filter the data that appears. For the purposes of this Service Center project, I added Date filters to view only the cases that were opened between 2 user input dates.
I also added an Account name filter so that a user can report on Cases related to all Accounts or for just a specific Account that may be requesting the report.
This functionality can also be extended to allow users to filter for only Cases related to a certain Owner, Priority Level, Product Type, or any other differentiating data that you record in your CRM or other SQL based application.