A dashboard is a Web page that displays information from disparate data sources to help inform business decision making. In SharePoint 2007 you can use dashboard to display reports, charts, or key performance indicators (KPIs).
Displaying information together in one place helps you communicate status, observe trends, anticipate problems and opportunities, and make better decisions. To illustrate, the following sales dashboard example includes:
Message from Management: message from the management urging the sales team to increase accessory sales.
Quarterly Sales Summary: list of KPIs that obtain and display data from the corporate accounting software.
Sales Details: tables and charts from an Excel workbook that obtains data from the sales software.
Filtering: enables an employee to change the view of sales information, making the information more relevant to the employee.
Creating a DashboardYou can create a dashboard on an existing or new SharePoint 2007 page by adding Web Parts, such as Key Performance Indicators and Excel Web Access used for Sales for the Quarter and Sales respectively in the preceding Sales Dashboard.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must have the "Contributor" permission level to create a dashboard.
If you're in a SharePoint Report Center you can create a dashboard on a new page using the dashboard template. Starting with the template can be faster than creating a dashboard from a blank Web page. The template is a starting point, you can add or delete items and change the appearance of the page after you create it. The following Web Parts are included with the dashboard page template.
Make a Dashboard More Relevant to Users with Filter Web Parts
You can add a Filter Web Part to your SharePoint 2007 dashboard so that others viewing it can filter the information that appears. Filter Web Parts pass values to Web Parts that contain sets of information, enabling the view of the information to change based on the value. The changing view helps make the information more relevant to users.
The default view for sales in the preceding dashboard is, by default, "Accessory unit sales table & chart." The view is filtered by bicycle accessories, such as "Gloves." An employee can change the view by clicking Browse in the "Filter Sales By" area and selecting a different view, such as "Regional unit sales table & chart." Now the view is filtered by sales regions, such as "East."
1. Sales filtered by Accessory unit sales table & chart:
2. Sales filtered by Regional unit sales table & chart:
The Filter Web Part can be visible on the page to ask for user input, such as the "Filter Sales By" Filter Web Part in the preceding sales dashboard, or they can be invisible, as is the case with the Current User Filter Web Part that filters data based on the user who is logged on to the computer.
Information Sources for a DashboardThe Web Parts of a SharePoint 2007 dashboard can obtain and display information from:
Manually entered data
SharePoint lists
Office Excel 2007
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services reports
Business data connectivity Web Parts that can visualize information residing in line-of-business applications.
NOTE: Not all Web Parts can use all of the preceding information sources.
