Scheduling and emailing reports with CRM

David Jennaway wrote this article.
-------------------------------

A common customer request is to be able to schedule CRM reports and automatically send the report to one or more users by email. This can be done without the need for any code, but needs a combination of configuration within both CRM and Reporting Services.

CRM Configuration
CRM reports are designed to be run under the context of the user running the report so as to return only the data that user has permission to see. Due to this configuration, Reporting Services will not permit you to schedule CRM Reports out of the box (if you try, you'll get the error 'Subscriptions cannot be created because the credentials used to run the report are not stored') . The easiest way to resolve this issue is to download the CRM Report Scheduling Wizard from here and install it on the CRM server.

Then, navigate to Workplace, Reports in CRM, select the report you want to schedule, and go to More Actions, Schedule Report. As you will do the scheduling later within Report Manager, I'd suggest you select the following options:

• Generate snapshots 'On demand'
• 'Make snapshots available only to me'
• Specify any parameter values
• You then need to specify the credentials under which the report will run. This needs to be a valid CRM user
• 'Yes, generate the snapshot now'

Reporting Services configuration
The rest of the configuration is done via Reporting Services. First of all, you may have to configure the email properties of Reporting Services. To do this open RSReportServer.config, which by default will be in the Reporting Services\ReportServer directory under the SQL installation directory in Program Files. Within the 'RSEmailDPConfiguration' element you will need to set values in, as a minimum, the 'SMTPServer' and 'From' elements. You may need to apply other settings. For more information see the documentation for SQL 2005 or SQL 2000

Scheduling the Report in Report Manager
You can now schedule the report. Browse to Report Manager (by default it will be in the Reports virtual directory), go to the OrganisationName_MSCRM folder and the report you have scheduled (it's name will have the suffix On demand Snapshot). On the toolbar you should have a button 'New Subscription'. Click this, select 'Report Server E-mail' in the Delivered by drop down, and set all other options as required. (If 'Report Server E-mail' is not an option, go back to the instructions in the above paragraph