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

Setting up Office 365


Before we start building dashboards with Microsoft Power BI, we have a little setup work to do in Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Power BI sites, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The good thing is they live inside the Microsoft Office 365 platform. To use these applications, we first need to set up a Microsoft Office 365 instance and user account. Once we establish the Microsoft Office 365 instance, we can access application subscriptions and manage users who use the Microsoft Office 365 Admin Portal.

Here is how it it's done:

  1. Navigate to Microsoft Office 365 website using the following link:

    http://products.office.com/en-us/business/explore-office-365-for-business

  2. Go to Plans and Pricing and select the plan type that fits your business. There are a few different plans that can be used with Dynamics CRM Online and Power BI, but in this book, we will use the Office 365 Enterprise E3 30-day free trial.

  3. Once in the Microsoft Office 365 account setup window, enter your company information and create an account. The account provision process will kick off, and you will be logged in to your Microsoft Office 365 Admin Portal shortly after it is provisioned:

    The interface as seen after signing in