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

Getting started


The Power BI Designer and Power BI for Office 365 contain a variety of different data source connectors that we can use to access the data of ERP. A few of these options are:

  • SQL Server

  • ODBC

  • SSAS Connector for Dynamics GP Analysis Cubes

In this chapter, we will use the connector for SQL Server, which is a deployed instance of SQL Server databases for the Dynamics GP sample company database. If you do not have access to a Dynamics GP instance, download and import the sample TWO.mdf database file from the following link (https://www.dropbox.com/s/e3ohgpz8agtxc7h/TWO.mdf?dl=0). If you have Dynamics GP installed with the sample company, use the TWO database.

Tip

To download a trail version of the latest version of SQL Server, refer to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-sql-server-2014.