Business
Context
Salesforce Einstein Analytics is
the latest generation Analytics offering from Salesforce, that allows us to build
and visualize data in a smart way helping business having best view to analyse
and act on it. These modern dashboards not only help your management to view
and analyse business data, also helps your customers (i.e. your external users)
to take informed decisions. And it is becoming quite common use case (I have
experienced similar use cases for few banking customers) where the ask is to enable
your external users to view the dashboards and allow them to access from any devices.
In this article let’s discuss how we can approach it and relevant challenges.
The Solution
approaches and the Challenges
The first step - off course is to
build the Dashboards using Einstein Analytics Studio (using data set, lenses
etc) and perform couple of fundamental steps – 1| make sure you share it to
community through share option of it’s relevant Einstein Analytics app (‘Enable
sharing with Communities’) 2|also from Analytics Settings you need to enable ‘Share
Analytics with Communities’. Let’s go to next step (I am purposefully skipping
“Mobile Layout” now, will come back on this area later while describing the
challenge below)
The next step is to expose your
Einstein dashboard into Salesforce Community (but only catch is users with Customer
Community plus, Partner Community and Lightning App license can access it as of
today from the community). You can expose Einstein dashboard into your
community in multiple ways – if you’re using lightning template, the easiest
option is to use built-in “Wave Dashboard” component and embed your Einstein
dashboard, few other option is to develop lightning component or visualforce
page embedding Einstein dashboard (while this custom option gives more
flexibility, the lightning component is latest way of handling this).
And the final step is to make
this “Community with embedded Dashboards” available for your external users who
will access it through mobile. Needless to say this is the “challenging area”.
To elaborate this – interesting question is how your customer would access
this? Few possible options – through 1|Salesforce 1 mobile app? 2| Salesforce Analytics
for mobile app? 3| mobile web browser? 4|custom developed mobile app 5| new
offering from Salesforce?
Let’s talk about it each…
Salesforce 1 mobile app CAN’T be
an option at all if you’re using lightning community since it is not supported.
Salesforce Analytics is also NOT
supported for community users i.e. external users.
So far we have seen most of
customers using mobile web browser to access Salesforce lightning community, it
works well (even though not supports all mobile browsers, check it limitations),
however it does not show the mobile layout configured for the Einstein
dashboard (that you configured in Einstein studio) intelligently, so you might
not see a very good view in your small screen.
Possible mitigation
When you’re following mobile web
browser option, the above limitation can be handled (with a bit nasty way) but
you can configure 2 set of Dashboards for each requirement – one for desktop version
and second one for mobile version, and then develop a lightning component which
will show the dashboard dynamically based on user accessing from desktop or
mobile (use $Browser global value provider in conjunction with aura:if and
wave:waveDashboard), finally embed that lighting component to your
community page.
Moving ahead towards remaining
two options, ‘custom mobile development’ approach certainly provides ability to
represent wide spectrum of custom functionalities with APIs; but remember this
will cost effort and off course a good amount of mobile development expertise.
Considerations before you implement…
- Since Customer Community license does not work for Einstein Analytics, consider reviewing Salesforce Community license.
- ‘Salesforce Mobile Publisher’ feature is not free; you need to purchase license to avail.
- Mobile layout should always be low weight containing assets compare to your desktop version of the application, so be mindful to design it.
