Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.x comes with a wide variety of tools to view the data in your CRM system. Through the use of SQL Reporting Services reports, elaborate charts and dashboards can be created and are provided through many of the built-in reports as well as available accelerators from the open source Codeplex.com website. Beyond these accelerators, the ability to export data into Microsoft Excel as dynamic pivotTable and worksheets from CRM enables you to take advantage of the most widely used analytics engine on the planet. Through the tools available in SharePoint, additional accelerators are available as well as custom code opportunities to create most any type of dashboard imaginable. Beyond all these great choices are a number of outstanding 3rd party Business Intelligence tools such as from Zap Technology and C360.
So, with all these great options available, why Snapshot Charts for CRM? To put it simply ... simplicity!
All of these great tools and products do great things and we deploy these at many of our clients and won't stop deploying them even with Snapshot Charts for CRM in our toolbelt. What we have discovered is that as needed as some of these reports and dashboards are, the majority of the time, all people really need / want is a better way to represent the data they already know how to get out of CRM using Advanced Find and they want to be able to do it themselves or in minutes of time instead of always with a programmer and days of time.
Snapshot Charts for CRM was designed with the thought that if you could design an Advanced Find query, you can build a chart and if you can build a chart, you could put a few of them together to create your own dashboard.
