Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By : Steve Ivie
Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By: Steve Ivie

Overview of this book

<p>Dynamics CRM 2015 holds a wealth of information about customers and the sales pipeline, but sometimes leaves users with basic end-user reporting and dashboard options. Power BI is a great new tool for analyzing and presenting data, giving us the ability to dig deeper into the information. With the increased requests for real-time sales analytics, Power BI when connected to Dynamics CRM offers a self-service approach to build, shape, and present data through an easy-to-use interface. The set of features within Power BI will give all users a tool to generate real-time sales productivity reports and dashboards to enhance their sales performance.</p> <p>This book will provide you with the skills you need to learn how to build and present Dynamics CRM 2015 sales dashboards using Power BI. It follows a step-by-step process to build an interactive dashboard by organizing and consolidating datasets, improving the look and feel of graphs, charts, and maps, and enhancing data clarity with filters and slicers.</p> <p>By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will learn how to use the Power BI Q/A functionality to query data in the dashboard, extend the dashboards to the mobile apps for the iPad and Surface, and leverage the pre-built workbook template provided by Microsoft for Dynamic CRM 2015 sales, service, and marketing dashboards.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Getting Dynamics CRM 2015 Data into Power BI

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is a powerful sales automation and relationship management tool with fantastic built-in reporting features. However, when it comes to analyzing data, there is now a more powerful option available with Microsoft Power BI. In this book, we will explore the functionality of using Microsoft Power BI integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. We will show you how to build an interactive sales dashboard, which can be used by everyone (from a salesperson to the CEO).

We will build an interactive sales productivity dashboard that will answer the common salesperson's question: "How is my team doing?" We will build this dashboard with native Microsoft Power BI functionality, including charts, graphs, maps, summaries, and tiles that will be viewable in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 and mobile apps.

This chapter will take you through the following topics:

  • How to set up and configure Microsoft Power BI for Office 365

  • Connect and access Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 datasets

  • Explore methods to connect to Dynamics CRM data with Power BI