InoDashboard – Dynamics CRM Business Intelligence Dashboard released

Dynamics CRM requires a comprehensive tool for monitoring the KPI in a visual/dashboard format. Inogic labs has come up with InoDashboard, a Business Intelligence Dashboard designed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to fill in this gap. This tool will allow the CRM users at each level to design a dashboard specific to them and include the reports and monitor areas specific to their interest.

It comes along with a pre-packaged bundle of about 40+ reports that provide you with the most commonly requested reports for monitoring the KPI. Whats more is that with the wizard kind of UI it is very easy to develop your own custom reports/charts with basic knowledge of writing SQL queries. The Dashboard can be seen as below screen shot.

Its feature set includes

• Easy to create reports to analyze your CRM data.
• No learning curve required. Use your SQL query writing skills to design reports.
  
• Ability to add CRM reports, views, custom website URL
• User personalization available.
• Secured reports. Pre-defined reports use Filtered Views to force inbuilt CRM security.
• Ability to drill down to CRM entity forms.

Technical details

• It is developed using .NET Chart control for designing the various charts
• It makes extensive use of Web parts to support personalization
• It supports the following types of charts shown in the screen shot.

It supports Dynamics CRM 4.0 On-premise with IFD

We have come up with this after a lot of research in this area some of our r n d was put up in our earlier blogs http://inogic.blogspot.com/search/label/Dashboards where we studied the various ways in which a dashboard could be presented in Dynamics CRM.

Designing Simple Dashboards with .NET ASP Chart Controls and web parts

In our last post, we had explained how we could integrate SRS reports in Web Parts and make a user friendly Dashboard easily.

The Dashboard work just great… but on the presentation front, SRS report is not that flexible and it takes up a lot of space with the additional toolbars that the Reportviewer bring along. Yes there are few options that can be passed along in the querystring to hide these additional toolbars but then it doesn’t seem to work across all versions.

You must have come across a number of third party chart tools that help you create fancy looking charts. We decided to use the freely available .NET Chart controls available from Microsoft. Today we explain how we could use these controls to make easy to use and fancy looking charts that can be integrated in the webparts to enhance our Dashboard.

.NET charts enable you to design various types of charts

Area FastLine Pyramid SplineArea Bar FastPoint Radar SplineRange

BoxPlot Funnel Polar StackedArea Bubble Kagi Range StackedArea100

CandleStick Line RangeBar StackedBar Column Pie RangeColumn StackedBar100

Doughnut Point Renko StepLine ThreeLineBreak PointAndFigure Spline Stock

Lets pickup a simple column chart example that shows Won/Lost Opportunity comparison by Sales Rep.

1. The first step is to design the SQL query to retrieve the required information. We would need to design the query to return the result in the following table format

Sales Rep Won Opp $ Lost Opp $

2. So we have 2 series that need to plotted the Won Opp series and the Lost Opp series. The two series would be assigned to the Y-Axis. The Sales Rep being on the X-axis.

3. Once you have the query ready and you have decided on the X and Y axis series, you just have to go ahead and set these as the chart properties.

// Set chart data source
chart1.DataSource = myCommand;

//Set the Chart Type
chart1.Series["Series 1"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Column;
chart1.Series["Series 2"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType. Column;

// Set series members names for the X and Y values
chart1.Series["Series 1"].XValueMember = "Sales Rep";
chart1.Series["Series 1"].YValueMembers = "Won Opp $";
chart1.Series["Series 2"].YValueMembers = "Lost Opp $";

// Data bind to the selected data source
chart1.DataBind();

The ValueMember above needs to refer to a column of the SQL query designed.

Note: If you wanted this to be a Bar chart instead… no fuss just change the chart type of series to bar chart

chart1.Series["Series 1"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Bar;
chart1.Series["Series 2"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Bar;

4. Placing a chart control on a web form and binding it with the data as explained above, you should have a web page ready that displays a fancy looking chart ready.
5. Next step would be to add the URL to this page in your Web part Dashboard and voila you have integrated this with Web Parts as well and now you can benefit from the features of both the tools.

Hope you get going!!!