CRM 2011 Training Series – How to Schedule reports in CRM 2011?

How to Schedule reports in CRM 2011?

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 schedule report feature is used for creating report snapshots. There are a few reasons to use this report snapshot functionality:

Send as a SQL Report Server email subscription
Cache ‘point-in-time’ snapshots
Use as the user-run report for especially long-running reports

Select the report you wish to schedule and click Schedule Report from the ribbon:

This will launch a wizard for creating the snapshot

In our scenario we are going to select ‘On a schedule’

Frequency window offers a myriad of options. Set your run time (server time)

Select a start date and end date, if necessary

If the report has parameters you will need to select them here. Optionally you could the edit the filter and for example use date parameters such as ‘Last x days’ that will of course be respected for each subsequent snapshot.

A final review screen will summarize your selections

It is now essentially a copy of the report you selected so you have the same options such as visibility controlled by the ‘Display In’ selection. If the report will be used for an email subscription you may decide to hide the snapshot from general users.

After your snapshot has run it will be accessible from the report management list in CRM

In order to set up the email schedule we need to navigate to the CRM report server and the organization that you were accessing. Usually this will be http://ReportServerName/Reports

The scheduled snapshot will be in the ‘CustomReports’ folder

Hover over your snapshot report to see the drop down menu and select ‘Subscribe’

The first time a subscription is set up for this report you will need to select ‘New Subscription’. If you come back to modify the subscription you will select and edit

Several options for emailing: The subscription can go to any address however if you check the ‘Include Link’ only CRM users will be able to access. If any recipients will be non-CRM users you will want to check the ‘Include Report’ box and select a render format – the same options are available as when you run the report (Excel, PDF, etc.)

I like to include a valid ‘Reply-To’ address in the user has issues they may be apt to click reply

The subject will default with @ReportName variable which will be the GUID of the report. I recommend changing to friendly text