Dashboards Defined

A dashboard is loosely defined as having a lot of visual information, displayed in a number of different ways, on a screen for a user to quickly assess the current state of affairs. A car’s dashboard, for example, provides the driver with important information about the current state of the car—how fast the car is going, the current engine temperature, the amount of fuel in the tank, and many other things.

Similarly, a web dashboard provides a manager with several key pieces of information about the current state of affairs. The previous sections discussed how Reports and Scorecards are ultimately displayed as web parts on SharePoint pages. In the SharePoint and PerformancePoint world, a dashboard can also be thought of as a web part page. When creating a new dashboard in PerformancePoint Server, a new page is added to the SharePoint Pages library, which, when published, can be viewed by authorized users.

Like all the other PerformancePoint components discussed, a new Dashboard page can be created from one of two places: the Create Ribbon or the Workspace Browser. If you’re accustomed to creating new pages in SharePoint from the various layout pages available, the first screen of the New Dashboard interface should be familiar. On this screen, you are presented with a set of dashboard page templates, each of which provides a unique combination of web part zones. Select the zone that is right for you for the data you want to display.

Note

Users are not ultimately tied to the page layout that was initially selected. If the user right-clicks on any existing dashboard page zone, she can add new zones, split a zone into two, delete the zone, or change the existing zone’s settings. Using these options, she can essentially change the whole layout of the page she started with.

After selecting a template, a Details pane is displayed on the right side of Dashboard Designer (as shown in Figure 30.9). As you create scorecards and reports, or grab existing ones from your SharePoint site, those elements become available for you to drag—essentially as web parts—onto your dashboard page. Simply drag the appropriate ones to the various zones available.

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