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

Creating the Dynamics CRM solution


While in Dynamics CRM, we need to create a new solution with the HTML menu page web resource to access the Power BI dashboards and reports. To start, we will create a new solution just for the Power BI dashboard and report custom web page.

Here is how we will create the new Dynamics CRM solution:

  1. While in Dynamics CRM, navigate to SETTINGS | Solutions and select New from the top submenu bar under All Solutions:

  2. Once the New Solution form opens, name your solution and save it. In this example, I got really creative and named the dashboard as Power BI. How original, right?

  3. Now, select Web Resources from the left-hand side menu and add a new web resource for our HTML page:

  4. Enter the information for Web Resource: Power BI Menu Webpage, set the Type to Webpage (HTML), and upload the HTML file that you downloaded:

  5. After the web resource is added to Solution, select SAVE and PUBLISH ALL CUSTOMIZATIONS.