SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard - The Next Generation (R1.5) is Almost Ready!

The Bamboo Product Management Team pays special attention to what users have to say about our products. Why? If we don’t, how can we improve them? The most common feedback on the SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard R1.0 is that it's nice looking, offers nice charts, and is an effective tool for SharePoint project management. The SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard allows you to visually grab viewers' attention with charts, and offers KPI to show a project's health and progress --- but with R1.0, users had to manually update that information on their lists. As a result, the most common request we've received from users was to provide the ability to see the data roll up from their project sites automatically when someone updates a list at a project site. You also told us that you would like to be able to purchase SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard as an individual product from the Bamboo storefront, as opposed to being available exclusively as part of our Project Management Suite.

UPDATE (05.21.2009): Version 1.5 is available on the storefront. Check out my latest blog for more info.

With SharePoint Portfolio Dashboard R1.5 we've improved the appearance of the charts and, most importantly, we've granted your requests, beginning with a new feature allowing users to roll up their data via mapping. Data mapping allows the application to pull the data in from multiple project summary lists, and then the dashboards with multiple charts automatically get updated with the latest information.

How do you do that?

Here are a few steps with screenshots to show you how it works.

1. Map your list and columns to the Portfolio Dashboard list and columns:

• Type in the URL of the location of the list. (Note: It's a one-to-one mapping. Therefore, it should be only one Project Summary List per project site.)
• Select the list.
• Map columns to Dashboard Columns.
• Map choices of a column to choices of a Dashboard column.
• Auto discovery of similar lists from the sibling sites and sub-sites.

Users only need to set this up once. Next time, when the project summary list(s) at the project site(s) get updated the Portfolio Dashboard list and the charts will automatically get populated with new data.

 
2. The data will show in the Bamboo Project Dashboard Mapping Web Part:
Refresh allows the application to pull the new data from the reference list(s) when users update at the project site level.

3. Charts will display the data as expected from the rollup:
Display some of the Charts with selected skins:
 

SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard R1.5 is coming to you early next month (May 2009). You can still buy the product as part of the Bamboo Project Management Suite, but as of the R1.5 release, you may also choose to purchase it as an individual item. Keep an eye on our storefront or, better yet, set an alert or sign up to receive our monthly E-News.  And be sure to keep the feedback coming on our SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard forum!