CRM 3.0 Report Scheduling Wizard

Microsoft just released the Microsoft CRM 3.0 Report Scheduling Wizard which helps you create report snapshots more easily. Without this wizard, you needed to leave the Microsoft CRM user interface and go to the SQL Server Reporting Services Report Manager to create your snapshots. So putting this snapshot functionality with the Wizard interface in Microsoft CRM is obviously a very nice utility. You can schedule report snapshots using one of two methods:

• Scheduling reports to run on a specific interval (every Monday at 8am, etc.)
• Creating report snapshots on demand

After you install the Wizard on the server, you'll see a new option in the report menu. From there you can launch the Wizard which will guide you through the steps to schedule your reports or create report snapshots. We tried it and it works great!

One important note regarding report snapshots, you must specify user credentials to run the report with. Therefore, every user who views a report snapshot will see the data generated from the report credentials you specified, not the user's credentials. However if the user runs a live report it will use their credentials so they see only the data that they should. In addition, the Wizard lets you specify which users you want to share the report snapshot with, so you can block out certain users if you need to.