Using Web Parts for Interactive Reporting
Management dashboard—don’t you love those two words? Management does. A dashboard provides an interactive summary that consolidates, aggregates, and arranges project measurements, such as schedule and budget tracking. The dashboard is displayed on a single screen so that information can be monitored at a glance.
In a SharePoint PMIS, dashboards are created using web parts, which (as described in Part 3: Adding an Announcement List) are customizable software components that are added onto a page without any programming. In a PMIS, web parts can perform various functions, such as:
Displaying graphical or chart-based representations of high-level project information
Allowing external information from other systems or websites to be displayed or to interact with existing PMIS information
Web parts are similar to customizable web pages that are available on the Web. For example, do you have an iGoogle or My Yahoo! account? If you do, you know that you can easily customize these web pages by specifying which components or widgets you would like to have on the page, such as news, weather, sports statistics, stock quotes, and so on (see Figure 7-14).
Figure 7-14. A customized My Yahoo! web page
Web parts are created in a Microsoft development environment and are displayed in web part pages (see Figure 7-15).
Figure 7-15. Web part page
A web part page can ...
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