Custom Software Apps & SharePoint Consulting

SharePoint Dashboards – Keep your eyes on the road, not an (old) excel sheet!

If you’re at work and you’re getting things done, then chances are you have a lot of windows open on your desktop. You probably have an instance or two of Excel open, each with a few different spreadsheets that you have to update and re-load on a regular basis throughout the day. I’d wager a bet that you also have a few applications open, tracking orders or processes that are vital to your business. And then you’ve also got your Exchange calendar open, too, keeping you up-to-date on your tasks and calendar items throughout the day.

That’s a lot of un-centralized information—a lot of wasted time tabbing between windows, manually crunching numbers, and working with stale information as you fight to keep up with the fast-paced, contemporary business world.  As a decision-maker, your time is better spent making decisions rather than collecting the information you need. But how do you bring together all of these applications and information in one centralized place?

SharePoint, of course! More specifically, you need SP dashboard to bring all this information together. Here’s a Case Study of a recent SharePoint Business Intelligence Implementation!

Just like the dashboard on your car, a SharePoint dashboard provides you with a single place to find the metrics and information you need to make quick and important business decisions. A dashboard may be populated with calculated tables, key performance indicators, drillable and linked reports, and SharePoint Web Parts to surface information both inside and outside of the software.

One of the clear advantages of surfacing information within SP is the ability to control security and views based on the SharePoint and AD group membership of the user viewing the dashboard. Dashboard pages can be built according to the needs of each decision-maker, whether that person is a department head that needs to see aggregate data specific to his department, or a VP who needs to see an aggregate of each department’s performance. This software can then expose links to only the groups and individuals who need to see them by managing permissions and audience targeting for those dashboards.

Share Point also supports a variety of different ways to surface your dashboard data. SP Web Parts allow you to drop in SSRS Reports, PerformancePoint Dashboards, and a variety of third-party Web Parts from software companies you already know and trust. You can surface CRM data from Microsoft CRM, payroll data from QuickBooks, inventory information from your line-of-business application, and display all of them on the same page. You can also keep a pulse on the world outside your walls by including some Web Parts that pull stock feeds from Bloomberg and a Google News Alert feed for your organization. That sort of information-at-a-glance is what these dashboards are all about.

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