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About Dashboards

Dashboards can display saved Siebel CRM On Demand Answers requests, images, charts, tables, text, and links to Web sites and documents. A dashboard consists of one or more pages, which appear as tabs across the top of the dashboard.

Siebel CRM On Demand provides a number of prebuilt dashboards. In addition, users who have the Manage Dashboards privilege in their role can create interactive dashboards that provide customized views of corporate and external information. If your role has this privilege, you can use the dashboard editor in Siebel CRM On Demand Answers to add content to an interactive dashboard by dragging and dropping the content from a selection pane onto the dashboard layout page. The layout page consists of columns to align the content, and each column contains sections that hold the content. The appearance of a dashboard, such as the background colors and the size of text, is controlled by styles. You can also change the dashboard appearance using the cosmetic formatting dialog box.

NOTE: You cannot change the prebuilt dashboards in CRM On Demand.

Interactive dashboards can contain three types of content:

  • Dashboard objects
  • Content that is saved in the CRM On Demand Presentation Catalog
  • Views of folders in the CRM On Demand Presentation Catalog

When creating or viewing interactive dashboards, note the following points:

  • A user who creates or edits an interactive dashboard can add to the dashboard any reports to which they have access.

    Reports are stored in folders, and access to these folders is determined by user roles. The Manage Dashboard privilege (which allows users to create and edit interactive dashboards) does not include the Manage Custom Reports privilege (which provides full access to all report subfolders and reports under the Company Wide Shared Folder). For more information about folder visibility, see the About Reports and Setting Up User Visibility to Shared Report Folders topics.

  • Reports added to interactive dashboards may not be visible to all users in the company (depending on their role).

    If a user's role does not allow the user to view a certain report on a dashboard, the user sees an error message on the dashboard where the report would have been displayed.

  • If a report is deleted after it has been added to a dashboard, a user editing the dashboard sees an exclamation mark (!) beside the report name in the Dashboard Editor. A user viewing the dashboard sees an error message where the report would have been displayed.

The following table provides definitions of the common terms in the dashboard editor in CRM On Demand Answers.

Term

Definition

Columns

 

Columns are used to align the content on a dashboard. (The sections within columns hold the content.) You can create as many columns on a dashboard page as you want. Every new dashboard page automatically contains one empty column with one empty section in it. The columns used in dashboards are not related to the columns used in reports.

Dashboard Objects

Dashboard objects are items that are used only in a dashboard. Examples of dashboard objects are sections that hold content and navigation links.

Folders

Folders are organizational constructs that hold content saved in the CRM On Demand Presentation Catalog, such as requests created with CRM On Demand Answers. A folder is similar to a UNIX directory, or a Microsoft Windows folder.

Pages

Pages contain the columns and sections that hold the content of a dashboard. Every dashboard has at least one page. In the dashboard editor, pages are identified by tabs across the top of the dashboard. Multiple pages are used to organize content. For example, you might have one page to store results from CRM On Demand Answers that you refer to every day, another page that contains links to the Web sites of your suppliers, and one that links to your corporate intranet.

Results

Results, also called reports, are the output returned from the CRM On Demand server that matches the request criteria specified using CRM On Demand Answers. The default format for viewing results in a dashboard is to show them in a table. Results can also be shown in other formats, such as charts. You can examine and analyze results, save or print them, or download them to a spreadsheet.

Sections

Sections appear in columns in the dashboard layout. They hold the content dragged and dropped from the selection pane, and are used to organize the content within a column.

Styles

Styles control how dashboards and results are formatted for display, such as the color of text and links, the font and size of text, the borders in tables, the colors and attributes of charts, and so on. Styles are organized into folders that contain Cascading Style Sheets (files with a .css extension), images, and chart templates. You can override some elements in the style sheets, such as the table borders and text size, when formatting results in CRM On Demand Answers.

Presentation Catalog

The CRM On Demand Presentation Catalog stores the content created using CRM On Demand Answers. The types of content stored in the Presentation Catalog include: requests created with CRM On Demand Answers, filters that are applied to results, and information about dashboards.

Related Topics

Steps for Dashboards

About Reports


Published May 2008