My name is Ryan Bialek I'm part of the cloud
business development team here at Prophet
and I get the privilege of talking about
Dynamics 365 and office 365 here's to
customers on the Prophet team today we're
going to spend about 15 minutes talking
about dashboards with in Dynamics 365
within the crm and sales applications
and this really applies to anyone on a
sales team and in sales managers as well
as our marketing teammates that use
Dynamics 365 just a few housekeeping
notes before we jump into today's topics
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do so on the YouTube live Channel you
need to sign in with your YouTube or a
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screen and you can ask questions as we
go through we'll do our best to answer
those as they pop up so today's
objectives for the webinar are to review
Dynamics 365 components that are
available to us to use in dashboards
together we're gonna build a sample
dashboard and we're going to go ahead
and share or assign a dashboard here
within Dynamics 365 just a few other
things to consider with dashboards in
Dynamics 365 the error meant to present
information to help you do your main job
again whether you happen to be in a
sales role and a sales management role
or a marketing role you can really slice
and dice the information and
presentation of information on your
dashboard so it suits your main role
dashboarding isn't out-of-the-box
functionality within Dynamics 365 for
the most part the capabilities here are
quite powerful but you can go as far as
even using Power BI if you are looking
for more or different chart types or
different graphical representations
your data what we do have though out of
the box again is quite capable and can
be personalized or shared across your
team if you want to make a dashboard
that's just for you or you want to make
one for the whole sales team for example
dashboards are great for those who are
visual visual folks visual learners or
visual presenters because you can see
visually how you're tracking against an
objective that you may have which is
quite important in sales and marketing
you can create actionable lists so we
can see lists of customers lists of
tasks list of things that you need to do
or a list of things that you have done
or activities that have taken place as
well you can surface external
information as you can bring things that
are outside of Dynamics inside to
Dynamics 365 so you can stay in the
application and keep your day moving
forward so I do want to cover the
dashboard components and you'll see once
we get into the live demonstration
there's a notion of having a layout to
your dashboard and there's six different
ones to choose from I'll show you that
in just a moment but the real core
components are lists so again we can
have lists of customers lists of
prospects or leads a list of phone calls
or lists of to do tasks in your
activities entity we can bring in charts
so we can perhaps do a funnel for sales
we can compare sales by corridor by
sales rep for example we can bring in
things like web resources these would
have to be existing already in Dynamics
365 so if you're bringing in graphic
graphical pictures or resources of the
sort you can embed those into your
dashboard you can bring in iframe
objects for example this is a good way
to bring in external feed something like
a Twitter feed or a news feed if you had
wanted to embed into your dashboard and
last but not least I'll give you a quick
look at what using power bi dashboards
looks like in Dynamics 365 so let's go
ahead now and jump right into a
demonstration bear with me for one
moment while I pull up a live sample
tenant of Dynamics 365 and we'll get
right into making a dashboard all right
so here we are in Dynamics 365 just
happen to be using a sample bit of
information here inside of the Chrome
browser
as you can see by default I have this
sample tenant set to load the sales
dashboard by default and you can see
here just to use this as an example
these three items here at the top are
lists we have an all activities lists we
have an open opportunities lists and we
have a my leads scored list if we scroll
down a little bit you can see this is a
3 column wide 2 column deep sort of
grid that's one of the view options we
have we can see here we have another
list of active accounts and here's some
of the charting capabilities that we
have we have our open opportunities
represented in a sales pipeline everyone
in sales loves the funnel representation
of our sales pipelines and here we have
another chart here showing all
opportunities sorted by top customers as
we can see a lot of them are blank but
we can see that pros ware Inc is sort of
our highest customer with a number of
top opportunities in a sum of estimated
revenue so again if you're a visual
person that needs to see things at a
glance as you go through your day or you
need to drill into certain areas quite
frequently building a dashboard can be a
useful first step in there and now these
are the out-of-the-box dashboards that
are pre-built with customer engagement
in the CRM side of Dynamics 365 we have
an agreements main dashboard we have a
sales activity dashboard we have a sales
activity social dashboard which I think
is probably the second most useful here
a few more charts here that we can bring
in as far as open opportunities open
leads opportunities that are tops are
sort of ranked by size closed
opportunities in current that are topped
by customers and then we have an
activities list here at the bottom so
another example of one of the layout
choices now there's no data available
here because this particular demo user
I'm using doesn't have a lot of
information but you can see how you can
lay different things out set different
column widths and set different heights
for example and lay out your dashboard
that way it works for you and lastly
here just to give you a taste of
bringing in power bi into Dynamics 365
if you create a dashboard
in the power bi desktop workspace you
can surface that dashboard here through
sharing through office 365 and through
dynamics 365 you can pick up those
dashboards here in Dynamics 365 so you
can see quite a lot more visual a lot
more appealing and again this is
harnessing the power of power bi with
some of the different ways you can
represent data and this data can be
pulled from Dynamics 365 databases or it
can be pulled from external databases
like sequel tables Dynamics GP if you
want to bring in your customer balances
for example Italian with your other
accounting program so sky's the limit
here we're not really going to cover the
power bi section beyond this but rest
assured if you want to work with a power
bi partner like prophet the skies are
the limits here for creating power bi
dashboards ok from here we can go ahead
and create a new dashboard and that's as
simple as clicking on the new icon here
in the ribbon and we're gonna create a
new Dynamics 365 dashboard and that's
going to pop us up the dialog window
with some information here and some of
the choices around layout and some of
the different items that we want to
input into our dashboard ok here we go
we've got the choose layout dialog now
and here's the variety of layouts that I
had mentioned you can pick from there's
the three column regular dashboard we
can have a three column multi focused
dashboard for column this isn't too
particularly useful because some of
those lists will get quite narrow it's a
little bit hard to see we have a two by
two we have a row with three and one
large list on the bottom for example we
have one big one with four off to the
right-hand side or we have this sort of
four column interesting dashboard here
with four smaller units across the top
and two wider ones for for today's
example let's just go ahead and pick the
2x2 grid I find that's the most useful
on a variety of screen sizes for example
so we'll go ahead and create that now
and we're gonna move to the dialog where
we
pick the different components in our
dashboard so you can see this pops up
our apps window this is running behind
the scenes if you have never played sort
of behind the scenes in Dynamics 365
before a lot of power here that you do
use in the power apps designer so you
can see here's our 2x2 grid we can go
ahead and give our dashboard a name and
we can get really creative now with the
elements that we want to land in each of
our four sections so you can see these
small icons here we have the ability to
add our charts our lists we can insert
the relationship assistant that's a
little bit of AI that will tell you if
you have leads that are closing soon
opportunities that are closing soon or
activities related to something that our
closing sooner past due here we can go
ahead and insert an iframe we can add
our web resources or we can bring in a
small power bi tile into the dashboard
so with this blank canvas now let's go
ahead and start adding some elements
into our dashboard up here on the top
left let's go ahead and start with a
list I'm just going to click the insert
list icon here and you'll see we have
the add component dialog box that pops
out now two important things that we
need to pick from one will be the record
type and one will be the view so any
entity that exists in Dynamics 365 in
the context of our CRM for example we
can pull into the dashboard here so
let's for our example let's go ahead and
pull in contacts and the view is always
going to bring up your default view but
again these are all the a system views
that we have for this particular user
I have happened to have pin the my
active contacts view so we'll go ahead
and just keep that as the default we'll
go ahead and click add and you can see
now that the contacts list element here
is in the top left corner of our
dashboard it's not going to show any
data it won't do that until we save out
and go back to the actual dashboard
window but for now we have this space
occupied by a list view of Arc
TACT's let's go ahead and do another
list here one that I like to use in
particular is a view of my tasks you can
sort of use this as a pseudo to-do list
or if you have tasks or appointments and
so forth
dedicated to you or assigned to you in
Dynamics 365 again this is a good way of
seeing you know visually start your day
a few times throughout your day what the
tasks are that you have assigned in CRM
ok so that's going to be in our top
right hand corner of our dashboard let's
just scroll down a touch now let's go
ahead and do a chart now the next bottom
left section here we'll go ahead and
click the insert chart button and we're
just going to wait for this dialog box
to pop through and again same deal
record type view and chart so let's go
ahead let's go ahead and do tasks again
and we'll go ahead and take the view of
my tasks and then we do have some
options here as far as what kind of
chart we want to show maybe we want to
show some tasks sorted in the months
that they're due tasks by owner tasks by
priority and owner or test tasks by
priority so these system charts that are
already built into the task entity so
let's go ahead and pick tasks by
priority you can see in this case it
does give us a sample preview of what
this charts gonna look like so quite
interesting we can see here visually
okay we've got three high priority tasks
and one low priority tasks may or may
not be helpful for you as it relates to
your tasks but again the sky is the
limit here anything that can be sort of
charted or quantified you can bring in
here and make a visual representation on
your Dynamics 365 dashboard okay so the
next element we're gonna play with now
is an iframe this one's a little bit
trickier and I want to let you know if
you are using iframes in your Dynamics
365 dashboard if you are running into
trouble be sure to try a different
browser sometimes chrome or edge don't
like the iframe coding whereas you may
find success in Internet Explorer and as
well a lot of modern websites
now are actually blocking the use of
iframes so if you do some searching on
Google or Bing you can find apps that
will help you test if a particular
website is supporting iframes for
example putting a Twitter feed is a
little bit trickier because Twitter
doesn't support the iframe easily but
let's go ahead and I'll show you an
example of a website I was able to get
working rather easily so we'll go ahead
and click the insert iframe icon that's
going to pull up a more detailed dialog
here we have the component name again if
you get into more of the detailed
complicated Java scripting program you
can call on web resources and that's how
you can get some of those stickier web
sites into the iframe components but for
what it's worth I went to the government
of Canada's weather website and I've got
the forecast here the weekly forecast
for Winnipeg so we're going to go ahead
and I just going to paste that URL in
here otherwise we're just going to leave
everything else the way it is and the
way it is set up here the only
difference is we're gonna check the
Enable for mobile box down here in the
visibility section so we'll go ahead and
click OK on that so again we're not
going to get a preview of our iframe but
d 365 is going to save everything we've
got here so far so now we've got
something in all four of the sections of
our dashboard let's go ahead and save
this we'll go ahead and close out of
this window and we'll go back to dynamic
365 in a web browser just to see what
this dashboard looks like ok here we are
back in our dashboard you can see that
it is showing up here now in our list of
dashboards available to us we've got our
four panels in the top left we've got my
active contacts in the top right we have
the task list sort of my pseudo to-do
lists that we've created here down in
the lower left we have the my tasks
chart we can see I have three high
priority tasks and one low priority task
so sort of an interesting visual based
on the same data that's up here and then
in the bottom right-hand corner for the
block we do have
our government in a Canada forecast so
this is kind of cool maybe run a
seasonal business and you do want to see
the current weather conditions or the
forecast that might impact your business
having that in a dashboard in your CRM
in 3d 365 could be helpful to you so you
can see it's just a plain old website
and we can scroll through it here within
the iframe section in our dashboard now
one important thing to note here and as
you do zoom in or zoom out you may
notice that the reactive design of the
unified interface here in Dynamics 365
does change some of the elements so if
we zoom out far enough we do get that
2x2 grid if we zoom in d 365 is doing
its best to realign this for any screen
size and it's actually going to make us
one column and four sort of building
blocks tall so again it's a little bit
tricky I know this is the layout that we
picked it was the 2x2 but check your
zoom if you are having troubles with the
layout in particular okay one last thing
before we wrap up today I'm just going
to go ahead and zoom back in here just
so you can see a little bit easier what
I'm doing a few more action buttons here
on the top ribbon of our dashboard we
have a set as default button so if you
want the webinar dashboard to always
show up when you click into the
dashboard section here you can go ahead
and click that not too hard to do if you
want to clear that default or change it
out you can see here that the button has
changed and last but not least is the
shared dash or button so go ahead and
click that let's say we want some other
teammates in our organization to use
this webinar dashboard that we've
created we can go ahead and add users or
whole team's if we'd like to so it's as
easy as picking a few folks here let's
say Alan Alicia and Allie all want to
use my beautiful dashboard with the
weather forecast we can go ahead check
them off here add them to the list and
now we can even go as far as changing
their permissions so we can give them
permissions to write delete a sign and
share any of the records that they see
through the dashboard that I've come up
with so
and share that out and we get a progress
bar and within a few seconds those users
will be able to pin up and even set that
dashboard as their default as well so
there we have it that is my quick look
at building dynamics 365 dashboards
again just to recap dashboards are a
good central location for key
information for yourself or for your
team you can add visual representations
of key goals metrics pretty much
anything that is quantifiable from your
entities in Dynamics 365 you can pair up
your dashboards with power bi items if
you want more capabilities or more
visually appealing and graphics if you
will you can bring in external
information and sort of create an
information hub for your salespeople and
you can personalize your dashboards as
you keep them to yourself or you can
share them up to a team just a quick
note on some of the upcoming webinar
wednesdays that we have here at Prophet Business Group we're on the air each and
every Wednesday morning at 11:30 a.m.
Central time and just a quick look ahead
through the month of September on the
4th with the GP team we'll be back to
talk about electronic bank recs on
September 11th I will be back to talk
about office 365 and employee shift
management on September 18th the power
Power BI team will be back to talk about
working with Dax and on the 25th to
round out the month I will be back on
the Dynamics 365 track and we're
actually gonna start looking at quoting
in the Dynamics 365 system again I'd
like to thank you for your time this
morning
in tuning in to our webinar Wednesday if
you'd like more information on the
upcoming webinars and you can also view
our on-demand video sessions that's a
www.prophet.ca/webinars or you can
subscribe to our YouTube channel if you
are tuned in live there should be a
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way you'll never miss a beat and every
time we go live you'll be sure to to
notice if you want to talk more about
sales team productivity sales process
enablement dynamics 365 dashboards I'm
certainly a guy here at Prophet Business  Group
my email address if you want
to reach out is RyanB at prophet.ca and again
I'm happy to chat All Things D 365 and
digital transformation thanks again have
a great day and get building some
dashboards in Dynamics 365 take care
