Beyond Power BI content packs for Dynamics CRM reporting

So much of the functionality related to building and managing Dynamics CRM environment has been made easier by the cloud. The one area that's been lagging behind the traditional on-premises environments has been reporting. With no direct access to the database for running your SQL queries, nor a cloud hosted version of SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) at your disposal, making use of Dynamics CRM Online data has unquestionably been trickier than what it used to be back in the days when everyone was setting up their own Windows Servers for CRM.

As Microsoft has built their cloud based data analysis offering in the form of Power BI, the traditional SSRS reports have started to look quite dated when compared to the interactive dashboards and mobile apps delivered by Power BI. For the Dynamics customers there's also been a nice set of preconfigured templates been made available to quickly deploy your first cloud dashboard from live CRM Online data. These Power BI content packs are:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Sales Manager
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Service Manager

Even if you're just playing around with a CRM Online trial subscription, it's worth investing a few minutes to deploy these content packs and connect them with CRM. Having real data available in both the built-in Dynamics CRM dashboards as well as the Power BI dashboards with scheduled data sync allow you to more easily evaluate what reporting scenarios fit which tool.

OK, so the template content in Power BI gets the CRM users excited, now what do we do? Well, this has been a difficult discussion up until now, since the Power BI content packs that Microsoft offers are not editable. You cannot simply add your own fields or custom entities into the sales and service reports, since this isn't something that the Power BI web client supports. You need the Power BI Desktop client to work on these more advanced areas of the report solution, but you cannot get the content pack "source code" from Power BI web client downloaded into the Power BI Desktop client (at least not yet). Doh!

Luckily, there is now a path forward from this step. Recently Microsoft made available the .pbix files that these Dynamics CRM Power BI content packs are made of. They sure didn't make too much noise about it, and the information has been hidden into the updated Technet article "Use Power BI with Microsoft Dynamics CRM", in the form of this casual note:

So, what are we waiting for! Time to go and download the .pbix files (here's the Sales Manager link, and here's Service Manager), open them up in Power BI Desktop and start investigating how the beautiful template reports have been created from Dynamics CRM data. This will surely be the quickest way for anyone new to Power BI based reports to gain an understanding of how to best use them for Dynamics CRM reporting scenarios.