The new Dynamics CRM Dashboards eBook a welcome bit of user guidance, experts say

For data that is centralized in a CRM system to be useful, it has to be processed and transformed into the information that sales, marketing, and service teams can easily understand and, more importantly, act on. One popular way to serve up that information is via dashboards.

Microsoft has released a new eBook on the subject, Create or Customize Dashboards. And experts in the field say that it's a needed, if somewhat elementary, step in educating CRM administrators on the subject.

"Dashboards are important in the sense that it's effectively a landing page for users in their CRM," said Matthew Mead Senior CRM Consultant at Catapult. "It's kind of an amalgamation of everything that's going on in their day - all their key metrics, their activities, their sales pipeline, goals. Everything that's important to them all in one place. It's the entry point into the system."

And it's not just system admins who can make a dashboard. Savvy users have the ability to make their own dashboards as well, said Ashley Kleeman, CRM Business Analyst at Edgewater Fullscope.

"It can be anyone from a sales or marketing manager to a sales rep in the fields who just want to see what's going on for their day," she said. "They can see any appointments that they have, phone calls. From the sales side, they can see what's in the pipeline, what's scheduled to close. Really almost anything that's within CRM, they have the ability to fit to a dashboard to see in a chart or list form."

Tad Thompson, Senior Technical Advancement ...