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

Dynamics GP deployment


The Dynamics GP application is deployed using a local installation of SQL Server, so we will have to configure Power BI to connect to the On-Premise environment. Since Power BI is a web-based tool, this means that we will need to connect and authenticate to the actual SQL Server that is installed on a local server.

In this chapter, we will launch the Power BI Designer and Power BI for the Office 365 site while they are authenticated to the same network as the Dynamics GP instance to build our new ERP datasets. To build the new ERP dataset, we first have to connect to SQL Server and the TWO database and then initiate a query-based SQL script.

Here is an example of how the sample data from the TWO database will look in Dynamics GP if you have it installed. If you do not have Dynamics GP installed, the imported TWO database is all you need.

The customer aging script

With a customer aging query script, we can build the perfect customer health report that joins the Dynamics...