How it Works¶
Lime BI is powered by Metabase and is installed as a service either running on the Lime CRM application server (or another server, if wanted) for on-premise or hosted by us for cloud customers.
Once the service is installed and running, the Lime CRM database is connected to Lime BI and the Lime CRM datastructure is synchronized to make it easy to ask the right questions in Lime BI.
The Lime BI service provides the UI for Lime BI, where the user can ask questions to the Lime CRM database. The questions and dashboards are stored in the Lime BI application database.
The questions and dashboards created in Lime BI can easily be embedded to show in both the web as well as desktop client.
The full user guide for how to use Lime BI (Metabase) is found here.
Asking Questions¶
The first thing to do in Lime Bi is to start asking questions. To do this, simply click the Ask a question-button in the top-right of Lime BI to start a new simple exploration of one of your tables, ask a more detailed custom question using the notebook editor, or write a new SQL query if you want to really dig in.
Questions can be visualized in different ways and further saved as widgets.
Creating Dashboards¶
A dashboard is a collection of saved questions that you want to refer back to and view regularly. It displays groups of questions and their corresponding answers.
Questions on a dashboard are meant to be viewed together, so they’re usually grouped by some kind of theme or topic e.g. Sales, Activities, or Helpdesk tickets. A Sales dashboard could show the number of deals by month, year, office, and more.
Have a few key performance indicators that you want to be able to easily check? Make a dashboard featuring questions that show your key metrics and share it with your team.
Dashboards can easily be embedded in Lime CRM or published to show on, for example, a TV screen.
Publish saved Questions/ Dashboards¶
In order to embed a specific question or a dashboard, you firstly need to publish it in Lime BI.
Note
This is only required for on-premise. If your application is deployed to cloud, questions/dashboards will be published automatically.
Go to the question or dashboard and click on the share icon, then "Embed this question/dashboard in your application". Afterwards, click on the publish button.
Embedding in the Web Client¶
The embedding in the web client provides three different alternatives:
1. Widgets on start page¶
Individual widgets can be embedded on the start page, and configured using the Start page designer or multiple start pages.
See example below.
2. Dashboard on Start Page¶
You can also show a complete Lime BI dashboard in the web client, that could also be embedded and accessed by pressing a button to show the dashboard in a modal.
What dashboard to show is also configured using the start page designer or multiple start pages.
See example below.
3. Widgets on Object Card¶
It is also possible to show individual widgets on each object card. The widget on object cards can be configured to use parameters to only show data in the same context as the object you are showing. For example, only show deals in a graph connected to the company object that you are showing.
Embedding in the Desktop Client¶
Lime BI dashboards can also be embedded in the desktop client for quick access.
See example below.
