Monday 19 May 2014

Dynamics CRM 2013 tips & Tricks

Tips & tricks for this week on CRM 2013 performance built-in tools: CRM 2013 comes with a hidden gem that can report on form loading times and a breakdown by component as well, you can access this performance report using the following shortcut after the form has been loaded:

  •  CTRL+SHIFT+Q
It may take a few seconds to appear, the below window should appear:


at the bottom of the report you also have a link to the known diagnostics page:



























Hope this was useful.  If you need advise on performance optimization please feel free to contact me on nuno.m.costa@gmail.com



Thursday 8 May 2014

Dynamics CRM Moving reports to new SSRS server

Moving CRM reports in particular external reports (if you use iframes) can become a time consuming task, however there a few tools that can make the process a lot easier which I would like to share with you.

Moving CRM reports to a new SSRS server
If you want to move all existing CRM reports users created in CRM the process is simple and takes a few steps and it's available within CRM. There are very good articles on other blogs on how to do this step-by-step, you can move or republish the reports using the following 3 methods:

  1. Using the Report tool PublishReports.exe on the Dynamics CRM Tools folder
  2. Installing the Report extensions connector (it will republish all reports)
  3. Or when you update the SQL report server URL via the deployment manager
The CRM reports under the customReports folder are stored in the database hence you can publish them at any time using the above methods.

Moving CRM external Reports (e.g. used with iframes or scheduled reports)
For external reports you would normally move it manually as there is no facilities in SSRS or CRM tools to do this for you, however there is a really great tool to do this for us:
https://code.google.com/p/reportsync/

When you run the tool you connect to the source SSRS server at this point you should start mapping data_sources from source to destination otherwise the reports will get the default data_source at destination when synced. You start by creating all data sources on the destination SSRS server exactly as the data_sources on the source SSRS server and then map them accordingly.

If you make this your first step you don't need to manually change all reports data_sources later on the destination SSRS server.












On the below screenshot connect to both source and destination report servers and choose the folder or the reports you want to move and select a destination folder click Sync



If you expand the folder, below you should see reports popping-up.

































Hope this was helpful.