Dashboard Topic:

Microsoft Dashboard

The fields of Business Intelligence in general and Enterprise Dashboards in particular are moving at such a fast pace that it can be a challenge to keep track of each vendor’s latest products and the ever-changing marketing efforts for their BI offerrings. I’ve been involved in other technologies as of late, so I was surprised when I heard someone refer to Microsoft’s vertical industry-related business intelligence offerings by the name “Microsoft Dynamics”.

I’ve since been catching up on the topic of Microsoft Dashboard and I see that by leveraging the components of sharepoint, scorecard manager, infopath, office 2007, reporting services and other services, Microsoft has put together quite a robust product for us involved with enterprise dashboard implementation.

As always, I sought out dashboard screenshots. I found a couple of good Office Dynamics Dashboards and will examine them in detail over the next few posts. Today, we’ll look at one called the Microsoft Dynamics CEO Scorecard that is powered by Sharepoint Server 2007, Office Business Scorecard Manager and Microsoft Dynamics.

A couple of things I notice:

The layout is strongly sharepoint-based with the use of webparts. Excel dashboard features are leveraged as you can see in the excel services webpart at the lower right. Note the conditionally formatted cell backgrounds with the colored gradient determined by the cell value. The office scorecard view is nice with the standard traffic light indicators, the uptrend/downtrend arrows and the collapse/expand functionality.

Tags: Microsoft Dashboard, Microsoft Dynamics Dashboard, Enterprise Dashboard, Executive Dashboard, Excel Dashboards, Sharepoint, Office 2007

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