Entity dashboards are a powerful, but little-used feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365
They’re ready to go for many entities, with no extra configuration. As well as displaying statistics, they’re a great way of shortcutting to individual records
What do entity dashboards look like?
Using Cases as an example, the default dashboard displays lots of information
- Numbers of cases by priority
- Numbers of cases by type
- Numbers of cases by product
- A list of active cases
- Numbers of outstanding and schedules tasks
This example would make a great task management tool for a support desk user. No need to switch between views or create static dashboards from scratch. All your relevant data is in one place.
All these lists and charts are interactive, so the data behind the statistics is just one click away. If you want to see what tasks you have today, just click on the tasks tile. If you want to see all high priority cases, just click on the high priority doughnut chart.
The rule with interactive charts is that you almost always click an item to drill down for more information or records.
You’ll find similar ready made dashboards for most system entities. They can also be further configured to work for your exact business processes.
This type of interactive dashboard is a Single Stream Dashboard – meaning the data displayed comes from one data source (in this example, cases) It’s also possible to use multi-stream dashboards for more complex situations.
Multi stream dashboards
These work similarly to single stream dashboards, but they allow you to display data from many sources. In this example the dashboard displays cases, emails and activities
How do I use entity dashboards?
It’s simple, to access an entity dashboard, just view an entity as normal in Dynamics (cases, for example) and choose Open Dashboards (this option may be hidden in the ellipses button menu)
You can choose Tile View to see data totals, rather than lists of records. Click Tile View to toggle between this and the normal Stream View
For more focused results, show the Global Filter to filter on specific conditions such as case type, created date or priority.
How do I configure entity dashboards?
There’s more about
- Layout of dashboards
- Security roles
- Design
- Configuring filtering fields
On the Microsoft site – Configure interactive experience dashboards
