DIGITAL DASHBOARDS

Digital dashboards are customized Office 2000 solutions that deliver critical, tailored information directly to a knowledge worker’s desktop by integrating personal, team, corporate, and external data in a single familiar environment, accessible in the office or on the road. A digital dashboard also makes it easier for people to find the information they need, while at the same time filtering out unnecessary information, increasing productivity and efficiency. Consequently, knowledge workers can better focus on their key business priorities and make more informed decisions.

A digital dashboard dynamically integrating personal, team, corporate, and external information

This document outlines the basic steps and considerations in building digital dashboards. It is not intended as a reference or a replacement for development guides for the individual components that may be used in a digital dashboard. As you will see, the flexibility of a digital dashboard to include information from a variety of sources makes it appealing to many different organizations. This document should serve as a starting point to thinking about new ways of using software to solve a variety of business problems and to deliver more focused information to knowledge workers.

Overview of a Digital Dashboard

In its simplest form, a digital dashboard is nothing more than a very dynamic Web page running within the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client. There are a number of decisions that need to be made, however, about what information to include on the page, how users will interact with the information offline, and what level of customization will be available to users.

Working with Outlook Today

The Outlook Today page is the core of a digital dashboard. Because the Outlook Today frame points at an HTML page, it is also easy to quickly develop custom solutions—such as a digital dashboard—that connect to virtually any information source.