CRM 2013 Dashboard Design Difference for Outlook Client and Web Client

I had an interesting design observation while working on a Microsoft CRM project – the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or CRM Online Dashboard behavior has slight differences between the CRM Outlook Client and Web Client.

One of the differences that impacted our project design was that the “See the records associated with this view.” icon on the upper right corner on a Dashboard’s List component.  It is missing in the CRM Outlook Client.  Note: The Dashboard’s Chart component is the same for both.

In the CRM Web Client – the icon is available:

In the CRM Outlook Client – it is NOT:

Since most of this project’s users access CRM via the CRM Outlook Client, we needed a good work-around to quickly open the list’s associated records view from the CRM Dashboard.

Here is an out of the box design approach:

Create a corresponding Chart component next to the List component.  You can size the chart component smaller and design it to show useful summary info.  Here is a design example:

This way, CRM Outlook Client users can quickly access the associated records view for their CRM operations by clicking on the corresponding Chart component.  I think this is a very good design approach for an operational dashboard that needs to show a list of records – the users have a visual chart summary of the data breakdown.  The other big design question I would ask is do the users of this dashboard needed any of the list components – or can they go without it and simply rely on chart components.

Contact me if you are looking for Microsoft CRM design help.

Frank Lee, Microsoft Dyanmics CRM MVP, San Francisco
Workopia, Inc. – Keeping up with the Cloud Innovations!