Select the right analytical option for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Your analytics options in Dynamics 365 have grown massively over the past few versions.

With CRM 2011, our options included only the built-in dashboards and charts, export to Excel, or SSRS reporting. Now we can add the Online Excel experience, various ways of exporting data to Excel, editable grids, and of course Power BI, with or without replicating the data to an Azure SQL database. Add that there are three versions of Power BI - free, Pro, and Premium - and if you have really large datasets you can also consider using Azure Analysis Services.

While it is great to have many options, it also becomes more complex to recommend or decide on a specific strategy. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself first:

• What is the volume of records? Over or under 50k for the individual chart?
• Is a delay on KPIs acceptable (real-time, few minutes, hourly, daily)?
• Are the Dynamics 365 security roles relevant?
• Are you including data external to Dynamics 365 in your analytics?
• Where are your KPIs and charts used? From dashboards or from a customer record?

Let's take the easy route first. If you can create your charts and dashboards with the built-in tools, then you should use those. Then there is no need to add complexity by using services and software external to Dynamics 365. But from then on, it gets complicated.

What might be a better option is to look at what makes each tool unique and great.

Dashboards and charts

While the built-in dashboards and charts are starting to look dated in comparison to newer tools ...