Third-Party Reporting Tools

If you must use a third-party reporting tool for your reporting and analysis needs instead of the tools bundled with Microsoft CRM, you can easily extend Microsoft CRM's reporting features to integrate new report types. By extending reporting to include new report types, you allow your users to run the third-party reports directly within the Microsoft CRM user interface, rather than having to leave Microsoft CRM and launch an entirely new application to get the information they're looking for.

When you extend Microsoft CRM to recognize new report types, you edit the Report.config file located in the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\_Resources\ folder on the server running Microsoft CRM (assuming a default installation). When you edit Report.config, you must specify three attributes:

• Report file extension

• Report handler

• Report type name

The sample Reports.config file that ships with Microsoft CRM includes the following information.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <viewers>     <viewer extension="xyz" handler="/Specialviewer.aspx" name="Special Report Type"/>     <viewer extension="abc" name="Client Rendered Report"/> </viewers> 

The extension attribute refers to the file extension of your report file. For example, Reporting Services reports are .rdl files, so their file extension would be "rdl". If your third-party report file used the extension .rpt, for example, you would set up the attribute to look like extension="rpt".

The handler attribute tells Microsoft CRM how it should render the report when a user runs a report with that file extension.

The name attribute changes the Report Type value that appears in the Reports list.

We can't go into too much detail about using the Reports.config file to integrate third-party reporting tools because its usage will vary depending on the reporting tool that you're using, but if your company is already commited to a different reporting platform than SQL Server Reporting Services, you can still integrate those third-party reports directly into the Microsoft CRM user interface.