CRMA Academy

Collaboration in CRM Analytics

The collaboration features shipped with your CRM Analytics license — sharing, notifications, annotations, downloads, explore, views, subscriptions, and watchlists — and why telling users they exist is the single biggest driver of dashboard adoption.

Collaboration in CRM Analytics

You've built the dataset. You've built the dashboard. It looks good, it's fast, the numbers tie out. And then, three months later, someone asks the question every analytics practitioner dreads: "How many people are actually using it?"

This section is about the answer to that question. Not because we're going to add anything to your dashboard — but because CRM Analytics already ships with a full set of collaboration features that turn a dashboard from a page someone visits into a thing that shows up in their inbox, their Chatter feed, their phone, and their home screen.

The key idea

Here is the thing worth internalizing before anything else:

Every feature in this section is already included in the license you're paying for. Notifications, subscriptions, watchlists, exports, self-service explore — none of it is an add-on, none of it needs code, and almost none of it needs a designer. It just needs someone to tell users it exists.

That last part is the job. In practice, the difference between a dashboard with twelve users and a dashboard with two hundred is rarely the dashboard. It's whether anyone ever showed the audience that they can get a Monday-morning email of their own pipeline, or an alert when their region drops below target, or a CSV export without opening a ticket.

So treat collaboration as part of the build, not as an afterthought. When you hand a dashboard over, hand over a five-minute walkthrough of these features with it.

Who does what

A useful mental model for this whole section is that collaboration splits across two roles.

The designer configures

Shares the dashboard, decides whether Explore is available, attaches help videos to widgets, and builds a download-friendly lens where exports make sense.

The user personalizes

Sets their own notifications, saves their own views, schedules their own subscriptions, and pins their own watchlist metrics — all against their own filters.

That split matters more than it sounds. Several of these features — notifications especially — behave differently for every person who sets one up, because they inherit that person's filter context. A designer cannot set them on someone else's behalf and get the right result. What the designer can do is make sure users know the button is there.

What's ahead in this section

  1. 1

    Sharing a dashboard

    Access, the Chatter post, the URL that encodes your current view, image download, and the print-to-PDF layout.

  2. 2

    Notifications and annotations

    Threshold alerts on a widget that follow the user's own filters, plus Chatter annotations with @mentions and screenshots.

  3. 3

    Downloading data

    Image, Excel, and CSV exports; why a values table beats a chart for row-level detail; and how to handle the 100-row limit responsibly.

  4. 4

    Self-service exploration

    Letting users open a widget in a lens and answer their own question — and how to turn that off when you shouldn't.

  5. 5

    Views

    Saving a set of selections as a named view, setting a default, and sharing the exact cut of data you're looking at.

  6. 6

    Subscriptions and watchlists

    Scheduled widget and table emails, the separate permission CSV subscriptions need, and pinning trending metrics to your home screen.

  7. 7

    Onboarding and Learn

    Attaching a help video to a widget so users can teach themselves what they're looking at.

By the end you'll be able to walk a business audience through every self-service capability their license already includes — which, in the real world, is what makes a dashboard stick. Let's start with the most basic and most used of them: sharing a dashboard.

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