PowerObjects has been providing our PowerDashboard feature within CRM since 4.0. That said, Microsoft has really upped the ante with the new dashboard functionality within CRM 2011 and I expect them to be even more refined by the final build. You will have a tremendous amount of flexibility on how to create your ultimate dashboard, keeping in mind that a core tenant of CRM 2011 is the idea of productivity. In addition to simple charts and graphs, you can flex your creativity and think of many unique combinations and use cases. Think "CRM User Mission Control Center".

When creating dashboards, you can essentially choose a layout from the choices here:

Then you can build out the layout with any combination of 4 choices:

Here are some samples of what each might be used for

• Charts & Graphs
  • Sales Pipeline & Forecast
  • Customer Service Cast Tracking
  • Sales Productivity Reports (Calls Made, Outcomes)
• CRM List / View
  • Upcoming Phone Calls
  • My Sales Opportunities View
  • Any View you can create from Advanced Find
• Web Resource
  • Silverlight applications
  • Images
  • Client side applications
• iFrame Content
  • Bing Web Search
  • SQL Reporting Services Report
  • Hoover's or other Sales Research Tools
  • SharePoint document library or Site
  • Any type of web content or application

As you can see, there are few limits to what you can do with the new dashboard capabilities - we are just scratching the surface. As always the Microsoft Dynamics CRM experts at PowerObjects are here to help – just reach out!

Happy CRM'ing