CRM 2015 some great new features to get insights into your data

December 15th, 2014 by Stephen Jones Leave a reply »

Significant investments in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 – mean that power users don’t need to learn to write code to build insights with the data in their CRM Systems.

In this short video Brandon Simons shows you how rollup fields and calculated fields can be created and configured from a simple interface.

Learn how to visualize and interact with hierarchical data like organization charts and account hierarchies in this short video. Prashanth GanapathyRaj shows the intuitive way hierarchy visualizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 can give you a better understanding of your business data.

Learn how Power BI (Business Intelligence) combines the power of Excel and Outlook 365 with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 to become a great platform for data analysis and visualization. In this video Narinder Singh also goes over CRM 2015 workbooks to help you understand the value of visualizing and analysing business data with Power BI.

In CRM 2011 you could create system and personal Dashboards and either use one of the predefined layout templates, or copy an existing one using “Save As”, choose a name, and give it a description .

If you changed your mind about the purpose of the dashboard then you could simply open it ,back up and change the name of the dashboard, and click the “Properties” button on the Ribbon to change the description.

CRM 2013 made a big change – although you could change the name of a dashboard, there was no “Properties” button on the command bar to change the description, so if you got it wrong when you first created and saved it – then you could not go back and fix it later. “Dashboard” is not an entity you can add to a Solution to work on the command bar RibbonXML using Ribbon Workbench, for example.

The workaround of making a further copy of the dashboard and setting the correct properties is all very well, but could mean having to change the default dashboards for each module in the SIteMap, and for users to have to set a new default if they were using the existing one.

Anyone using CRM for Tablets could only use the “out of the box” Sales dashboard, but if you wanted to change this you could modify every aspect of it (including the display name) to use it for non-sales purposes but you still could not change the description

What changes with CRM 2015?
The “Properties” button is back.
When you edit a dashboard and click this button you get a dialog box that allows you to change the description for the Dashboard. The description is shown to users as an infotip when they hover on the name of a Dashboard in a list, so it is a good idea to make it useful to your users.

Multiple dashboards for Tablet users in CRM 2015
Notice that this dialog box also has an extra checkbox labelled “Enable for Tablets”. This means that you can make additional system or personal Dashboards available to staff using the Tablet app. So as well as the Sales Dashboard, they can use other dashboards to see different aspects of their data.

Control access to Dashboards using security roles (since CRM 2013) so you can create more Dashboards and so that the list does not become too long for most of your users.
hide these from people who would not need the data

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