Table of Contents
1. Make the most of your CRM by displaying your Salesforce dashboards on your workplace screens
Salesforce is a huge name in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space. It offers so many solutions and integrations for all of your departments that it can easily make your head spin! However, that complexity makes it one of the biggest and most widely-used business analytics solutions on the market, being used by companies like Aston Martin, Ulster Bank, and Virgin Media.
With such advanced capability at your hands, it only makes sense that you’d want to make the most of that. You can create a dashboard to monitor your business performance and visualize how you’re doing — and how you could be doing better. When you integrate your Salesforce Dashboard with Fugo CMS, you can empower your teams and key players to make critical decisions based on the data that you’ve put in front of them.
2. Fugo TV Dashboards & Your Salesforce Dashboard
With the TV Dashboards feature inside Fugo CMS, you can easily and securely connect your digital signage with your Salesforce dashboard. You can quickly display your dashboards on the screens around your workplace without even having to leave your desk, and you can do it all without having to risk any of your sensitive business data by keeping your Salesforce credentials on an external device that can be lost, remotely accessed, or stolen, and without having to create a URL that just about anybody can come along and view.
Fugo handles the integration with third-party dashboards in a pretty unique way; recording the steps you take during the login process, encrypting them, and keeping them on a private Cloud server. Then, when Fugo fetches your most recent dashboard, the Cloud server runs through those steps, encrypts a screenshot of the dashboard, and sends it back to your CMS. This means your access credentials and business analytics are kept safe and sound from anybody trying to snoop on them.
3. Best Practices for Using Salesforce with Fugo
We’ll get to the walkthrough in just a second - but first, let’s go over a couple of best practices that we recommend following whenever you’re connecting any third-party dashboard service with your Fugo CMS account:
3.1 Create a service account:
We've worked hard to develop the TV dashboards feature so that your sensitive data is completely secure. But as an extra precaution we highly recommend using a 'least privileged' service account when setting up your dashboards - this is usually an account that has read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display on your screen(s.) You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.
3.2 Start with your dashboard URL
It's often the case that you can navigate directly to your target dashboard's URL when creating a new dashboard in Fugo. This will require you to log in, and then you’ll be redirected back to your destination. This is the quickest and most reliable journey you can make in Fugo Dashboards as it cuts out unnecessary steps in your journey.
3.3 Set your Salesforce password expiration policy to "Never expires". You may notice that your dashboard fails to capture when you are prompted by Salesforce to change your password - this is because Fugo can not bypass this prompt. If frequently expiring passwords are an issue blocking the stability of your TV dashboards in Fugo, you may want to update your password expiration policy so that your password never expires - this way you can avoid having to recapture your dashboards in Fugo after each time you've changed your password. You can find Salesforce's instructions for that in this guide.
3.4 Connect your Salesforce Service Account to 2FA authentication
For Fugo to access your Salesforce account in a secure and stable way, you will need to set up a 2FA One-Time Password Authenticator app for your Salesforce Service account (see instructions below 👇 ) if you don't have one set-up already. You will then need to use the same Secret Key and paste it into Fugo TV Dashboard as shown in step 4.10.
How to set up a 2FA One-Time Password Authenticator app
Go to Advanced User Details under My Personal Information in the right hand pane of your Salesforce account.
Next to App Registration: One-Time Password Authenticator, click [Connect].
Now you need to verify your identity in order to connect a one-time password generator: At this stage you should receive an OTP code on your email. Enter the code in the box below and click verify.
Follow the instructions on the next page to complete the authenticator app setup. Click on the I can't Scan the QR Code link in order to get the Secret Key.
On the final page you will see the Secret Key. First copy and securely save the key and then enter the verification code generated by your newly set up authenticator app into the corresponding box. This should complete the Authentication App connection setup.
🌟 Copy the Secret Key to Fugo
Once you have the Secret Key from your Salesforce account, you will then need to use the same Secret Key and paste it in Fugo TV Dashboard as shown in step 4.10 so that Fugo can securely 2FA authenticate with your Salesforce account.
4. Connect your screens to a Fugo account
4.1 Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.
Note: TV Dashboards are a part of Fugo's Business Plan. During your free trial, you can create one dashboard. To create any more, you will need to upgrade your plan.
4.2 Make sure your screen(s) are connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for that here.
Create a new dashboard
4.3 Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.
4.4 Click Create Dashboard to get started. This will take you to the New Dashboard recorder page where you will follow the instructions to capture and preview your dashboard before publishing it to screen.
4.5 Enter the URL you use to log in to Salesforce into the URL field (I’m using our ‘.lightning.force.com’ address) and click Go. However, we recommend using the URL directly from your dashboard, so that you -and our Fugo Recorder - can get where you’re going quicker and easier.
4.6 Fugo will open an incognito window using the URL you’ve entered. You should see a Salesforce login screen - go ahead and log in as usual (we use the GSuite login option, but you might be using a Username and Password combination). You’ll see on the right-hand side our Fugo Recorder beginning to take notes of the steps it will walk through when it fetches the dashboard later.
4.7 Once you’re finished logging in, you’ll see your home screen. Select the “Dashboards” link from the navigation.
4.8 On the next screen, select your dashboard. If you have more than one dashboard, or will be creating more in the future, we would recommend using the search bar to type in the name of your dashboard. This can help cut down on any issues the Fugo Recorder might run into with new dashboards being added to your account.
4.9 When you’re looking at your dashboard, simply press Capture Dashboard or use the Element Screenshot button to capture a specific part of the dashboard on screen. Your incognito window will close.
4.10 Fugo needs to use your Secret Key to access your Salesforce Dashboard, so you will be prompted to enter that before the Fugo Recorder can stop recording and tries to fetch your dashboard with the notes it’s taken.
4.11 You’ll see a “loading” screen while Fugo runs through your steps and captures a preview of your dashboard. It can take some time depending on how many steps were involved - so don’t sweat it if it takes a minute or two!
4.12 Voila! Your dashboard should appear in the preview area. If it all looks good, you can go ahead and publish it, or save it for later using the Publish or Save buttons in the bottom right, and skip to step 2.14.
4.13 If you see a “loading” screen instead, simply navigate over to the Advanced Settings tab and use increase the number in the “Pause” box before coming back to the Home tab and selecting Retry on the right-hand side. This tells the Fugo recorder to wait before taking a screenshot, giving your dashboard plenty of time to load in!
4.14 Selecting Publish will open the Publish Popup, allowing you to publish your dashboard directly to a screen or channel immediately, or push it into a playlist among other content.
5. How To Share a Salesforce Dashboard using Google SSO
If you are using a third party tool such as Google SSO to access your Salesforce, you should follow our guide on how to set up Google Service account and Google 2FA to allow Fugo to access Salesforce account in a secure and stable way.
6. Salesforce Dashboard Tips
When it comes to business intelligence dashboards, especially ones that can potentially get as complex and in-depth as Salesforce dashboards, there are a few important things to consider that can help elevate your dashboard and make it really helpful. On top of that, there are extra things to think about when displaying a lot of information on a screen that’s far away from your intended viewer, or isn’t directly within their control.
So, here are a few things to bear in mind when building your dashboard:
Clarity is crucial. The people viewing your dashboard are most likely going to be across the room from the screen - which means they’re going to need to squint if you’re cramming information in. Nobody can use all of the data you’ve worked to compile if they can’t read it, so it’s best to round your numbers to the fewest number of decimal points possible, keep plenty of space in your layout, make sure your fonts are big enough to be read without causing headaches or eye strain, and try to use colors that don’t clash.
Only use your key metrics. Before building out a dashboard, sit down with the team or the people that will be viewing it and using it to understand how they’re performing and figure out exactly what information they need to see. This can help to give them some control over what they’re viewing, something that’s important if they don’t have direct access to filter or update the dashboard themselves. It also means that your dashboard is always useful - it’s easy to go back and update a Salesforce dashboard, and have those updates show through Fugo, so don’t worry about re-evaluating what metrics you’re using after a week or so!
Guide the eye. When you’re creating your layout, see if you can figure out what information is the most important and have that display bigger than the other information. For instance, if you’re creating a sales dashboard, you might want to display a figure like “Profit compared to last month” in a prominent place on the screen, and in a bigger font. This gives a neat summary of what the dashboard is showing and implies a hierarchy of the information which can help your team make sense of what they need to take a look at. Use colors, font sizes, and positioning to help your team understand quickly where they need to look.
Salesforce has amazing and comprehensive documentation for its platform. We think a good place to hop in to their Dashboard documentation is their “Build a Dashboard” guide, which you can click here to view.
Did this guide answer all of your questions? If not, or if you have any feedback for us, feel free to drop our support team an email at support@fugo.ai - they’re always happy to help out.