The Power of Custom Dashboard Controls

Rex

ACT! by Sage 2008 (10.0) includes interactive graphical dashboards, helping companies monitor sales opportunities and activities, focusing on individual and team sales pipeline. Dashboards can be created and customized using the default 6 components that come with ACT!² . But did you know that with the ACT! Software Developer Kit (SDK) you can create custom dashboard controls in ACT! for Windows® products?

Custom dashboard controls are components built using the ACT! SDK, that show up in the dashboard designer toolbox, and can be dropped on a dashboard panel and be customized just like stock dashboard components. Custom dashboard controls are simply non-stock dashboard components that can provide a variety of new functionality and data.

How does a new kind of dashboard component help your business?

1. Provide new ways of looking at data
   Your business can benefit by looking at existing data in new ways. For example, a dashboard component could show opportunities by product, or include contact information as part of a list of opportunities filtered by stage.
2. Provide access to new data
   Your business may use custom fields, or even custom tables (introduced in 10.0.2) in ACT!. Having graphical and interactive dashboards to monitor that specialized business data can enable your business workflow. Also, you may need administrative dashboards, and using custom dashboard components you can display data such as when users last logged into ACT!, or synchronization information.
3. Composite applications and mashups
   You may have heard web 2.0 terms such as composite applications and mashups. Composite applications are applications consisting of functionality drawn from different sources. Mashups are web applications combining data from more than one source integrated into one view. Using custom dashboard components, you can integrate external system data into the ACT! dashboard. For example, you can display relevant ERP data from a different system, such as purchase order data in a dashboard component, adjacent to opportunity data, all in a dashboard to provide a broader view and monitoring of your business information. Along the same line, custom dashboard controls can display web pages or HTML, or use web services, to provide mashup data in an ACT! dashboard. For example, an ACT! dashboard with custom controls could be a mashup of pertinent business-specific news, financial, and trend information from different online sources, providing you with a broad overview of external factors that could affect your business.

To download free custom dashboard controls, or get useful technical tools to help create custom dashboard controls, please visit the ACT! Developer Network downloads section.