Dashboards in Microsoft CRM 3.0

A Microsoft CRM developer was telling me about his project to build some enterprise dashboards in Microsoft CRM. He showed me this post about CRM 3.0 dashboards.

Out of the box, there is no way to generate the dashboards that everyone is clamoring for. But, as the blog post linked to above shows, you can use the Microsoft CRM SDK to generate some very nice dashboards.

Here is a look at their very nice work. The charts are flash-based.

Security Dashboards

Dashboards for monitoring the status of network, web and email security are now common place. I can't think of many network security products that do not offer dashboards as the primary method of interacting with the end user.

Here are 2 dashboard screenshots of a security product.

You'll see liberal use of lights to show various states of key metrics.



Here is a closer look at one of the lower level pages:



Network Metrics Dashboard