Sharing CommitCRM Reports

Hey All-

After our first official month 100% on CommitCRM - we'd been using it in parallel with our pre-existing tools for the last quarter - we've finally begun to turn to the reports section - a critical part of end of month activities - and find that many of the report layouts are not as elegant as our previous solutions.

I realize CommitCRM offers the ability to customize reports but I was curious if there were any CommitCRM users who might be willing to share, or charge a small fee, for forms they may have already spent the significant time required to clean up or generate.

Might even be a nice Community add-on for later - a way to share Report (and eventually Project cause these are coming right? :) ) templates.

If anyone out there is willing to share some Report templates they've already invested time in let us know. We're particularly interested in reports breaking down employee hours by charge/item/account/week and the like.

Thanks in advance, Joe-

Count me in too, I'd love to get some help here as well.

So I'm not the only one having CommitCRM Report trouble! :(

I've had some conversation with the team surrounding this and it's clear there is need to clean-up the default report layouts and make them more useful. I'm hopeful we could get a small update to CommitCRM that would include improved report layouts that are meaningful and useful. That could tide us over until we get the next full release :)

I've run some of these reports and they are often simply illegible. While they can be modified with some invested time - it seems more efficient for me for CommitCRM to step-up and do it once so we can all benefit as opposed to everyone investing time in attempting to create some default useful reports.

Thanks Joe for your great ideas and feedback. Enhancing report layouts is something we hope to get to at some point. I think your suggestion of sharing designed report is a good idea. Designed reports can be saved to external files (called *.RTM), and loaded into a customized report elsewhere. This allows customized reports sharing quite easily.

Two technical notes though (1) it is important that all RangerMSP systems that share reports will be using the same version, and (2) It is very important to know the original system report from which the customized report were created from, as the receiving side should first copy the same original report, and only then load the RTM file.

Anyway, offering a public way to share reports (and post our own) is something we are looking into, thanks.

Sherry

Are you still considering a way to share reports with the community and so that the community can share reports with each other?

Thanks!

Luke

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: You can already send/receive reports to/from other users (see below), we will probably make it simpler in one of our future releases.

To send customize reports to others you currently can (with RangerMSP 5.0):
1. Open the Report Designer for the report you want to send.
2. Select the File > 'Save to File' menu option.
3. Make sure the filename is exactly as the name of this report in RangerMSP (except that the file will have a file extension).

To import a report received from another user:

1. Make sure the other user is using the exact same version of RangerMSP as you are.
2. Ask them to save the report to file as explain above.
3. Ask the other user which original system report they copied when originally customizing their own report.
4. Select the original system report in your RangerMSP system and select to Copy it to a new report.
5. Set the name of the newly created report to the name of the report file you've received (except for the file extension)
6. Open the newly created report in the Report Designer.
7. Select the File > 'Load from File' menu option and select the report file you received.
8. Save

As you can see, the option to send/get reports is already there and it can be very useful. That said it requires that you'll be carefully follow the step listed above and we may make it easier in the future (including opening a dedicated section on our web site for community users to share customized reports).

Neta

+1 for native sharing options - thanks FunctionOne.

We are still in the migration to being 100% CommitCRM internal, but should be done in a month or so. After that I too will be looking for reports. Did you receive any response, FunctionOne? Would love to see what others have come up with.

I'll post my custom ones when I get there.

Just a quick update - Starting with RangerMSP version 5.4, you can now easily share customized Reports, Activity Templates, Online Services and Email Templates in the new Community Sharing Center.

Each of these objects can be exported to a file, and uploaded to a dedicated community sharing forum. You can then download the file and import the customized object into your own RangerMSP system.

This can save you a tremendous amount of time as you can take advantage of a lot of work already invested by other users creating templates and customizations which may be very well-suited for your needs. You can also use the imported object as a starting point and further customize it to your specific requirements.

>> See more details in Community Sharing Center.
>> Enter the Community Sharing Center Forum.

The RangerMSP Team.

ive posted some!

:-)

This is a great feature and I've already "borrowed" a couple of psoted reports. Thanks!

Thank You! Enjoy.