The Sales Cloud dashboard is an intriguing concept.
It is intended to show as much information as possible on user interfaced that is optimized for tablet sized devices. In contains dashboard tiles that should provide information at the right level of detail, adapted to the role that the user using the dashboard has. Larger reports and charts can be found by drilling into these dashboard tiles, or by looking elsewhere in Sales Cloud, like the Analytics page or the Forecast page.
Let me show how to replace one of the standard dashboard tiles with a custom one.
Creating a new Dashboard Tile
The default dashboard tiles have a size of 150×150 pixels. This is important to know when designing them.
In the example tile below:
- The upper part of the tile showing the total closed opportunity revenue has a size of 150 x 60 pixels.
- The lower part of the tile showing the graph has a size of 150 x 90 pixels.
These sizes can be set in the properties of each of the views.
This dashboard tile report
can be downloaded here: Closed Revenue Tile
Once the dashboard has been created, make sure that you save it in a shared folder that has permissions set to be used by your targeted audience. The example below show that everyone who has BI Consumer Role can use the reports in the shared folder ‘/Shared Folders/Edward’ which is where I saved my new custom dashboard tile.
The BI Consumer role is a sub-role that is linked to nearly any role defined in Sales Cloud. This means that anyone will be able to be able to use this dashboard tile, but a more restricted report access can be setup here too.
The report is now ready to be added to the dashboard
Adding a new tile to the Dashboard
In order to add this new tile to a dashboard, an administrator needs to choose ‘Customize User Interface’ from the menu.
Since these dashboards can be role specific, choose the role for which you want to change the dashboard, or select ‘Site’ in case you want to change the default dashboard for everyone.
Now remove one of the existing tiles, and click on the ‘Add Content’ button to add a new one:
Now just select the report:
- Open ‘Oracle Business Intelligence’
- Open ‘BI Presentation Server’
- Open ‘Shared Folders’
- Open the shared folder where the new dashboard tile was saved and add it to the dashboard
All that is left is closing the ‘Customize User Interface’ menu bar.
