Mail-merge alternative: Reports exporting to Word files

CRM 4.0 does offer a lot of new features regarding mail merge, but not all situations are supported by the new features. You can look into 3rd party tools like C360 / MSCRM-Addons or Temptus Wordconnect, but a totally different approach is to use the Reporting Services. This post will dive into how to use Reporting Services to generate word documents.

You can create any report in CRM by using the Report Wizard. Imagine you want a specific invoice which contains a list of the products that are included in the invoice. This report is easily created in the Report Wizard. You can also run the report from CRM, but when you look at the export button, you will see that word is no option. Now you can do two things:
1) Go to Aspose and buy their product. They will allow you to export a report to many text formats including .doc, .docx, .txt etc.
2) Create a piece of code which transforms your report to a .doc yourself. Of course we'll dive deeper on this approach.

You can create an extension to Reporting Services which does the real export to a word document, but this is relatively hard. A way easier approach is to access the ReportinService webservice and get the report in a byte array and send this byte array to the user with a content type set to "application/vnd.ms-word ".

How to do this, is to create a webform which does have nothing in the aspx itself. In the code behind, send instructions to the user that a word file will is approaching.

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-word ";
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=YourFileName.doc");
Response.BufferOutput = true;

Then initialize the webservice and set the correct values

//Define report service
ReportingService rs = new ReportingService();

//Set Credentials
rs.Credentials = GetCredentials();

//Set URL
string reportServerPath = "http://SRSServer/ReportServer";
rs.Url = reportServerPath + "/ReportService.asmx";

//Define Reporting Services Variables
byte[] reportData;
string[] streamIDs;
string optionalString = null;
string rptNameFullPath = "/ORGNAME_MSCRM/4.0/" + "{02708d0c-28c5-dd11-9398-00155d511c04}"; // the guid is the name of the report in CRM.
ParameterValue[] optionalParams = null;
Warning[] w = null;

//If neccesary define datasource credentials. See note below for more info.
DataSourceCredentials dsc = new DataSourceCredentials();
dsc.DataSourceName = "CRM";
dsc.Password = "{E0E04CEF-04DB-DD11-9418-00155D511C04}";
dsc.UserName = "{DE9347FD-BC01-FD55-5218-045655D51C04}";

// Download the report from the webservice in HTML4.0 format
reportData = rs.Render(rptNameFullPath, "HTML4.0", null,
"/WebApplication1/",
null, new DataSourceCredentials[] { dsc }, null, out optionalString, out optionalString, out optionalParams, out w, out streamIDs);

// Offer download to user
Response.BinaryWrite(reportData);

When you do request this page in IE, then you'll get the report offered to you in a doc format because of the content type settings. Word does understand HTML and will just open the report.

Note: Make sure to check my other post around Reporting Services which might help you: Log In Name and Password required by Report Server

Not all emails are sent from MailMerge

Yesterday I looked at an issue with a colleague of mine (Nico Verhagen). The problem was that a mailmerge quick campaign has been created which should send out approximately 1500 emails. When the quickcampaign had finished, there were only 43 emails sent and nothing failed. How could that be true?

Apparently only 800 contacts had an email address specified, so that already is causing half of the issue. The second half was harder to find, especially because there was no error message anywhere.

The root cause of this issue appeared to be that the bit field for 'donotsendmm' has been set to NULL. Although the default is 'yes', the field had no value because the records were created in an import program instead of the UI. In this import program the default values were not set for the 'allow marketing' attribute. After setting the allow marketing to true, the emails were sent.

Hint: To update all the records in bulk on a supported way, Nico created a workflow rule which updates that field to set it to true. Then perform an advanced find to select the records for which the field has not been set to false and run the workflow on all the records on the page. You will then update 250 records in each run. You can set the record amount visible in your personal options in CRM.