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

Accessing the ERP data from the cloud


Most ERP systems are deployed on-premise with an actual local database. These are accessible by tools, such as the Power BI Designer, but what if we want to access the On-Premise database from the cloud-based Power BI site for Office 365? This means that before we are able to access any data from an Office 365 site, we need to install and configure secured access to our local machine or server from the Office 365 site in the cloud. We do just this in the Power BI Personal Gateway.

Tip

For additional information on the Power BI Personal Gateway, refer to https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/649846.

In Chapter 7, Deploy and Present Reports to the Power BI Site, you will learn how to upload and view your Power BI report file to the Office 365 site. With the Power BI Personal Gateway configured, it will give us the way to access the On-Premise database from the cloud.

Here is how you configure the gateway:

  1. From the Office 365 for the Power BI site...