Last month, Ilana Smith and Andrei Smertin wrote a post about the SubscriptionSyncInfo table and how this can be used to track synchronizations in the Outlook client. They mentioned that they were hoping to include a report that surfaced this information but weren’t able to include this with CRM 3.0. I had started creating an SRS report that would show this information before that posting and after seeing that there was an interest, I decided to create an additional report and make both available for download on the CRM Sandbox.
These reports may be useful for troubleshooting performance or may be useful to customers that want to know more information about how much data is being synched and how often it is occurring. The first report displays the MSDE sync information for all CRM users and it can be sorted on the fly by clicking any of the column headings (ex. click Sync Time to quickly determine which syncs took the longest to complete).
The second report displays information on the MSDE sync, Outlook sync, and Address Book Provider sync. There is a drop-down list at the top of the report that allows you to select any CRM user that has synched information to the CRM Outlook Client.
These reports are much more complicated than they look. Some of that is related to having to dynamically query the appropriate sync tables for each user.
One thing to be aware of is that a typical CRM user without elevated SQL access will not be able to run this report since the ReportingGroup only has Select access to the Filtered Views (not the CRM tables). Someone with Select permissions to all tables in the MSCRM database (ex. a SQL admin) will be able to run the report. Since only users with elevated SQL access for the MSCRM database will be able to run the report, you can choose to only display the report to certain individuals. You can do that by opening Report Manager (ex. http://<SRSServerName>/reports) after adding the report in CRM. Open the <Organization_Name>_MSCRM folder and click Show Details. Click the Properties button next to the report and then click Security. Click Edit Item Security and then click OK to the warning that appears. You can remove the Reporting Group access to the report and only Administrators will be able to view the report. You can also grant additional users or groups access to the report.