Create custom workspaces by modifying dashboards and Web Parts
Dashboards are useful tools in helping teams collaborate and share information. In the Business Applications area of Microsoft Office Live Small Business, you can use dashboards to communicate with co-workers, clients, and business partners. Dashboards can provide convenient central access to information and tools that members of your organization need to do their jobs. Dashboards are included with your Microsoft Office Live account, and you can customize them by adding, removing, and modifying Web Parts in ways that fit the needs of your organization.
In this article, we take a closer look at dashboards and explore ways in which you can use the built-in Web Parts in Microsoft Office Live Small Business to customize the workspace dashboards and streamline your organization's tools and workspaces.
In this article
What is a dashboard?
In Business Applications, a dashboard is a Web page that consolidates information from several areas of an application, such as on the
Team Workspace, and presents it in an organized way. Like the dashboard of a car, it groups a variety of tools and information together in a central location, providing a summarized view of critical data so that users can find what they need at a glance.
The main Business Applications dashboard provides a point of entry into your own group of business applications. In turn, each workspace in Business Applications also has a dashboard. For example, if you sign in to Microsoft Office Live and then click Team Workspace on the left navigation bar, you see the Team Workspace dashboard. This dashboard, shown in the following figure, acts as a home page for the Team Workspace application.
You can view a dashboard in two different ways: the company view contains applications and information that everyone in your organization can see. The personal view is the view that you create and you alone can access. For example, if the company view of the Team Workspace dashboard doesn't include a particular list or document library that you frequently work with, you can add it to your personal view. Similarly, a site administrator can prevent users from being flooded with too much information by removing infrequently used items from the company view of the dashboard.
You can easily change the view from company view to personal view by clicking company view at the top of the dashboard, and then selecting personal view in the drop-down menu, as shown in the following figure.
Only site administrators can configure the company view for each application. The examples in the following sections focus on ways in which a site administrator can customize the company view, but anyone who has been granted permissions can use virtually the same steps to modify the personal view.
Top of Page
What are Web Parts?
The content that you see in a dashboard is contained in Web Parts. Web Parts are prefabricated blocks of content —lists, calendars, libraries, and so on —that you can easily add and organize on a page. Web Parts make it easy to customize dashboards and other pages in Business Applications. You can include lists, timely information, and graphics on your dashboards, and you can arrange items in a way that best fits the needs of your organization.
There are two types of Web Parts: those that are specific to the application you are working in, and those that are included with all applications.
Top of Page
Scenario: Adding Web Parts to a dashboard
Ellen Adams, the owner of Contoso Real Estate, uses the Team Workspace application on Microsoft Office Live as her company's internal Web site. Her team uses it to create, organize, and share information in document libraries, lists, and calendars. Ellen wants to customize the Team Workspace dashboard so that her employees can have quick access to the tools and information they specifically need to do their work.
To start, Ellen wants to provide a summary list of internal housekeeping tasks for her employees. Her Team Workspace dashboard currently contains the Announcements, Calendar, and Links Web Parts. To ensure that all employees will see the same list, she customizes the company view of the dashboard.
Ellen signs in to Microsoft Office Live, and then she follows these steps to add a new Web Part to the dashboard:
- On the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, she clicks More, and then clicks Business Applications. Then, on the left navigation bar, she clicks Team Workspace.
She sees the Team Workspace dashboard in the company view.
- At the top of the page, she clicks edit.
The message
Version: You are editing the Shared Version of this page appears. This message tells Ellen that she is editing the company view of the dashboard; that is, the view that everyone in her organization will see.
- Ellen wants to add her list of tasks to the left side of the page, so in the left Web Part zone, she clicks Add a Web Part.
- In the Add Web Parts
dialog box, she sees a list of Web Parts that are available, including lists, libraries, and others.
- She selects the Tasks check box and then clicks Add.
When she returns to her dashboard, a Tasks Web Part appears on the left side of the page.
- After she adds the Web Part, she clicks Exit Edit Mode in the upper-right corner.
Ellen can then add tasks to the new list by clicking Add new item in the Tasks Web Part.
Top of Page
Organizing and rearranging Web Parts on the dashboard
After Ellen adds a few tasks to her list, she decides that she would like the list to appear in the right column of the dashboard instead of the left column. Using a drag-and-drop operation, she moves the Tasks Web Part to the area above the Links Web Part in the right-hand column.
- To start, she clicks edit at the top of the dashboard.
- In Edit Mode, she points to the Tasks title bar, and when the mouse pointer becomes a a four-headed arrow, she clicks and then drags the Tasks Web Part to the right column.
- When a horizontal bar appears on the page, she releases the mouse button to add the Web Part to the page.
- To finish, she clicks Exit Edit Mode.
Now that she has moved her new task list to the right side of the dashboard, she can continue to add tasks to the list.
Top of Page
Adding a What's New Web Part
Ellen's team will use their internal Web site to share timely information found in documents, projects, and other lists. She wants to make sure that her co-workers can quickly and easily find the latest versions of documents from the dashboard. So, she decides to add a What's New Web Part to the dashboard. With a What's New Web Part, Ellen can combine all new and recently modified items across multiple lists into one convenient list view on the dashboard. She can customize the Web Part so that it displays items created or modified as far into the past as she wants.
- As she did earlier, she clicks edit at the top of the page.
- In the right-hand column, she clicks Add a Web Part.
- In the Add Web Parts dialog box, Ellen selects the What's New Web Part check box, and then she clicks Add.
The What's New Web Part appears in the right column on the dashboard. By default, the What's New list shows items created in the last 72 hours. Ellen would like to change this time period to one week, and she also wants to edit the name of the Web Part.
- To do this, in the title bar of the Web Part, she clicks edit, and then she clicks Modify Shared Web Part.
A task pane appears on the right-hand side of the screen, and a dashed line appears around the Web Part.
- In the task pane, in the Select item type list, she selects Document, and under Select lists, she selects the document libraries, and then she indicates the number of rows that she wants to include.
- By default, How new are the items (hours)? is set to 72. Because she wants the list to display new documents from the past week, Ellen changes the number of hours to 168.
- Under Appearance, she edits the title to read What's New?
- She clicks OK, and the changes appear in the What's New Web Part. Finally, she clicks Exit Edit Mode to finish.
Ellen's employees can now start using the new company view of the Team Workspace dashboard to access and share documents and other information. By customizing this dashboard, Ellen provides her employees with easy central access to the specific tools that they need, thus helping to improve their communication, productivity, and teamwork.
Top of Page
Customizing the Business Applications overview page
The Business Applications overview page is the page that you see when you click Business Applications
on the More drop-down menu at the top of the page.
You can customize the overview page by adding Web Parts, much like a dashboard. The difference between the overview page and a dashboard is that the overview page does not allow you to add specific lists and libraries. Rather, the overview page is ideal the place to combine lists and libraries from all of Business Applications into a general summary.
The best way to combine items from multiple lists or libraries is to add a What's New or List Rollup Web Part.
- The List Rollup Web Part lets you combine separate items from multiple versions of a list into one master list.
- The What's New Web Part is similar to the List Rollup Web Part; it also lets you combine separate versions of a list into one central list, with the difference being that What's New is meant to show specifically those items that have been recently created or modified.
To learn about adding a List Rollup or What's New Web Part, see above, Adding a What's New Web Part.
Top of Page
United States
Sign in
Email this link
Printer-Friendly Version
