A digital dashboard is a user-configurable Web page that functions as an information portal. A digital dashboard consolidates personal, team, corporate, and external information and provides single-click access to analytical and collaborative tools. It brings an integrated view of your organization's diverse sources of knowledge to your desktop, enabling better decision-making by providing immediate access to key information.
You can create a digital dashboard from Microsoft Outlook 2002, by pointing to New on the File menu, and then clicking Folder. You can also create a digital dashboard from other Office applications, by clicking Add Network Place or Add Web Folder on the New File task pane. To create a digital dashboard, you must have access to a folder on a computer that is running Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. If you can't locate a folder to create a digital dashboard, or aren't allowed to create a dashboard in the folder you have selected, contact your network administrator or help desk.
By default, a digital dashboard consists of a single page, but you can create additional dashboard pages, called subdashboards, which are linked from the home page of a digital dashboard. To create a subdashboard, click the Content link on the home page of a digital dashboard, and then click the Create a Subdashboard link.
A digital dashboard and any subdashboards it contains display Web Parts, which are reusable components for displaying information that resides within the digital dashboard page. Web Parts can consist of simple HTML text for announcements and notifications; dynamic displays of data, such as lists or charts of stock quotes and sales figures; or information from other Web sites displayed within a frame. Web Parts can also contain controls, scripting, dynamic HTML (DHTML), or Extensible Markup Language (XML) to provide interactivity.
You can import Web Parts from the Microsoft Web Part Catalog by clicking the Content link on the home page of a digital dashboard. You can create Web Parts from the dashboard by clicking the Content link, clicking Create a New Web Part, and then clicking Show Advanced Settings to display all of the properties that you can define to create a Web Part. You can also create your own Web Parts by saving documents as Web pages from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, or Microsoft FrontPage into a digital dashboard folder. Additionally, you can create data access pages in Microsoft Access and save them as Web Parts by saving them into a digital dashboard folder.
By using the information and tools available in the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, you can create more complex Web Parts that integrate an organization's existing systems with the analytical and collaborative tools in products such as Excel, Access, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. For more information about digital dashboards, and to download the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, see the Microsoft Digital Dashboard Web site.