Creating your own dashboard is an excellent way to personalize the Dynamics CRM application by letting you organize the components in a way that suits your needs. Sharing the user dashboard allows other CRM users to access it while ensuring that you still retain ownership of that dashboard.
This recipe assumes that there is more than just one user account in your Dynamics CRM system. Navigate to the Dashboards section in the Dynamics CRM 2011 Workplace area.
Carry out the following steps:
The sharing of dashboards is only available for user dashboards in Dynamics CRM. The sharing rules (who and how) are stored with each individual dashboard. If you want to share multiple dashboards, you have to repeat the sharing steps for each dashboard.
Sharing and assigning dashboards in Dynamics CRM comes with many different options for granting permissions to users and teams. This section provides details on the available permissions.
When sharing a dashboard with other users in Dynamics CRM, there is a series of permissions that the owner can grant to other users and teams:
Read
permission gives the user the ability to view the dashboard, although viewing the actual data in the dashboard is controlled through CRM Security Role assignments as mentioned in the following section. Similar to the rules around viewing reports, if the user does not have permissions to view Accounts
in CRM (for example), then the dashboard will not show any data related to Accounts
. Write
permission lets other users edit and modify the user dashboard. They could change the title and add or remove dashboard components with this permission. Delete
permission will allow other users to delete the dashboard from the system. This would remove it from the list of any user who has Read
access to the dashboard. Deleting is covered in the Deleting a user dashboard recipe in Chapter 5,Editing and Deleting Dashboards. Assign
permission will allow users to assign ownership of this dashboard to themselves or other users in the CRM system. Assignment is covered in the Assigning a user dashboard recipe in this chapter. Share
permission lets users share access to this dashboard with other CRM users.When a dashboard is shared (for example, with a Read
permission) with other users in Dynamics CRM, the dashboard will be accessible by the those users, but the data in the dashboard is still subject to the access rights defined by each user's assigned security roles.
As an example, there are two users in a system and User1
creates a dashboard that contains Opportunity
data. The dashboard is shared with User2
, who does not have any Read
access for Opportunity
data in Dynamics CRM. Although User2
can select the shared dashboard from the list of user dashboards, the data contents of the dashboard will be restricted from view (blank) because of their lack of permissions. User2
would need to belong to a security role in Dynamics CRM that would grant them Read
access rights for the Opportunity
entity to get any value from the dashboard.
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