I'm streamlining a control panel offering for one of my clients whose first reaction to the Control Panel on a Community Server demo site was, "What the heck IS all of that stuff?" So it was important to reduce the control panel to its essentials, and one of the ways in doing that was to bypass the dashboard and load the administration page by default, essentially removing all traces of the dashboard. My pal JO Eriksson last September posted an excellent summary on loading the administration page by default in CS 2.1, but CS2007 requires a slightly different approach.
The above is all my client needs to see in the Control Panel at this stage of the project (in fact, several of the membership items can be hidden as well), and you'll notice there is no dashboard. To remove the Dashboard tab we modify the controlpanel/tabs.config file by moving the Administration tab to the front of the line and commenting out the Dashboard tab.
<TabCollection>
<Tabs>
<Tab resourcename="CP_Tabs_Administration" urlname="settings_ControlPanel_Home"
name="Setup" roles="SystemAdministrator...MembershipAdministrator" isRoot = "true" />
<!--Tab resourcename="CP_Tabs_Dashboard" urlname="controlpanel" name="Home"
isRoot = "true" /-->
<Tab resourcename="CP_Tabs_MyBlogs" href="~/controlpanel/blogs" name="Blogs".... />
....
</Tabs>
</TabCollection>
Next we'll update the SiteUrls.config (or add a SiteUrls_override.config item) to set the administrative page as the default location for the Control Panel tab by updating the controlpanel link's resourceUrl property.
<navigation>
<link name="home" resourceUrl="home" resourceName="jobs" roles="Everyone" />
.....
<link name="controlpanel" resourceUrl="settings_ControlPanel_Home"
resourceName="controlpanel" roles="SystemAdministrator...MembershipAdministrator" />
</navigation>