SnapShot! for Dynamics CRM is the ultimate documentation tool for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM organization. It produces reports that can only be created programmatically. Since many of you are not developers, we saved you the time and trouble of writing your own tool, packaged it up into a nice bundle, and did it for you.
Let’s take a quick look at the top 5 ways that SnapShot! can save your [you know what].
1. Security Reports
I discussed this in an earlier article, but have you ever found yourself asking the following questions:
How can I produce a report of all of my security roles and their privileges?
Something strange is happening with this one user and I know it is security-related, but I am not sure why she doesn’t have the permissions that I think she has. How do I figure that out?
SnapShot! has both security role and user privilege reports that can solve both of these problems.
2. Customizations
SnapShot! provides a comprehensive set of metadata and customizations reports for all of the following:
- Entities
- Fields
- Views (with or without detail)
- Forms
- OptionSets
- Relationships
- Solutions
- JavaScript library usage
- Plugins
- Processes
Or in a nutshell: Everything that I need to see about what has been added to a Dynamics CRM organization. This is the first report I run and review when I start a project at a new customers. It truly gives me a “snapshot” of what has been done and gives me an indication of what may lie ahead.
3. Business Units, Users and Teams
A complete list of all Dynamics CRM Business Units, Users, Teams, and their memberships is provided. This information is exported as an Excel worksheet which can be filtered and sorted. I generally use this combined with the security reports to make sure that people belong to the correct teams or to validate the organizational structure of both business units and teams.
4. Email Configuration
A complete list of email settings from across the system is provided as a single report. This takes into account personal user options, system settings, and mailbox configurations. I use this all of the time when troubleshooting email delivery or configuration issues.
5. Developer Tools
A wide variety of developer-related functionality is included. Some may be a bit of an edge-case but they all came out of a specific need that I had while working on various customer projects through the years.
One of the reports consolidates all of the events that need to be tested to validate your JavaScript, plugins, and workflows are working properly. This is typically given to the Quality Assurance department to help them develop a testing plan that will exercise each of the components that have custom code attached, so that it can be properly exercised and verified.
That about wraps it up for today.
Next Steps:
Here is what I would suggest you do next:
1. Download the trial of SnapShot! and run it against your Dynamics CRM organization. It will give you a really great snapshot of your metadata and you can see how it works.
2. Review the sample report. It was taken from one of my Dynamics CRM Online organizations and will allow you to see what the entire set of reports looks like.
3. Contact me if you have any questions.
Thanks and have a great day.
Mitch