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

What's coming next?


Power BI for Office 365 and the Power BI Designer are constantly being updated to fit the needs of its user's base. Every month, there are updates that can include new application or database templates. For Dynamics CRM 2015, in the near future, there will be additional dashboards for marketing and case management reporting.

As the Power BI product matures, there will surely be more and more templates added to the options that you can connect to. As shown in Chapter 6, Adding ERP Data, adding additional data sources will give us the ability to join and merge data so that we can gain deeper insights into the organization.

Currently, some of the more commonly - used data sources that are integrated into Dynamics CRM 2015 include the following:

  • Dynamics marketing

  • Marketo

  • Twilio

  • Google Analytics

  • SQL Server Analysis services

  • Visual Studio Online

  • The Azure SQL database