Customizable Home Page Dashboards in Dynamics CRM Online

Dynamics CRM Online November Service Update Article #2

If you’re a Dynamics CRM Online user, you might have noticed a few differences today. For one thing, if you tried to go to the old Getting Started page, you might have been surprised to see a brand-new Home page with three charts laid our horizontally. If those happened to be exactly the charts you wanted, excellent! Otherwise, you’ll be interested in the step-by-step tutorial I recorded on how to customize your home page.

Here’s the key thing: configuring your home page dashboard as I show in the tutorial is something any user can do. You can also create new charts — using another new tool called the Chart Designer — but that’s actually an entity customization, and I’ll cover that in a separate article.

For now, here’s a tutorial on how to configure your very own home page dashboard.

And by the way: the tutorial is a different style than I normally do. In particular, there are captions but no audio, so don’t bother adjusting the volume on your speakers like a few Trick Bag readers have told me they’ve done! :-)

November 10, 2009 · Filed under CRM Online, Cloud, and Social, Tips, Tricks, Q&A

3 Comments »

  1. Q&A: Dashboards; Relationships; Waits and TimeOuts Said,

    April 2, 2010 @ 7:14 am

    [...] Question: How do I customize my “Home Page Dashboard” in Dynamics CRM Online?  Answer: The customizable home page dashboard was introduced in the November 2009 Service Update of CRM Online, and any user can configure their own dashboard by selecting up to four charts that will be displayed there. Here’s an article with a link to a Captivate tutorial on how to configure your home page dashboard.     [...]

  2. Mike Said,

    May 19, 2010 @ 9:19 am

    Since this feature is only available to “Online” Dynamics clients, what about those of us who are running it locally on our own servers? Can this be created in some way whereas we don’t have to spend $700-$900 for someone to create this? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

  3. Richard Knudson Said,

    May 19, 2010 @ 10:11 am

    Hi Mike,

    As far as I know, the specific “home page dashboard” functionality I was talking about here is only a built-in feature of Dynamics CRM Online for now. There are a couple of things you might look into for on-premise:

    1. Check out the “Analytics R2″ accelerator available for free at http://crmaccelerators.codeplex.com/releases/view/19132 . The “Accelerators” are free add-ons built by Microsoft to showcase how you can extend the CRM platform. I have not deployed the analytics one in a production environment but I’ve used it in a test environment and I thought it was pretty good.
    2. There’s always custom reporting services reports. Not that there’s anything “free” about the time it might take to create dashboards with them, but at least there’s no extra licensing costs.

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