This is the FAQ for the April 6th, 2021 Talk to Experts Tuesday session on Migrating from QlikView to Qlik Sense.
The recording and transcript of the session can be found here.
Environments:
We are having a hard time showing the value of moving to Qlik Sense for those that are used to extremely Robust QlikView Dashboards. Do you have any suggestions as to how to handle these situations?
The first thing you need to do is decide on as a part of this is how are we doing a transition? Are we trying to do one of these variants? We've given them sort of friendly names. One of them is new projects only, so you keep your QlikView estate, for the time being, and you develop new applications on Qlik Sense. You, of course, could do a partial transition. You target the ones that are that can be moved over or make sense or things that are your long term strategic interest from analytics perspective because all customers have any analytics tool have Apps that just exist, and then they may go away at some point and that's okay. Full transition, you do conversion of all your QlikView estate and then the other one, a big bang or sort of one shot and just flip the switch. This is one that we don't see virtually any customers do because it's prohibitive. There's a lot of investment inside of the QlikView estate. You can't just flip a switch and automatically move over.
So, the first thing you need to do is sort of pick a strategy and try to be cognizant of what your staffing resources are and what you want, out of the new platform. You may invest in Qlik Sense for the new capabilities. You want to do conversational analytics, insight advisor. You want to do new stuff, new self-service capabilities inside of Qlik Sense mobility. As opposed to converting all of the very complex and dense QlikView dashboards. Once that's done, then you can decide on how you’re counting your success. But you need to have a plan in place before you even start to evaluate what success is because success is unlikely to be a big bang. Success is likely to be a waning of resources on the QlikView side and an increase of resources on the Qlik Sense side over time.
You mentioned robust QlikView dashboards. I don't know what your background is with Qlik Sense, but I would say, try to give it a fair shake on a modern version because in the past, probably three years we've added hundreds of visualization enhancements over time that close the gap. So, if you evaluated Qlik Sense 3.0 versus the modern Qlik Sense, it's just a different analytics platform in some sense, in terms of the complexity of visualizations that you can have on the front end.
Over the past couple years we've really turned up the level of advanced visualizations and capabilities, through our advanced authoring functionality within Qlik Sense. So, we encourage you to take a look at the latest version. It's a really powerful visualization solution and dashboarding.
If you need any more assistance selling it internally, please reach out to your Account Manager. They are well equipped to have those conversations, formulate a strategy and help justify things so you can make the case internally. It’s all about making an argument of some return on investment. It’s extremely important to work with us as a vendor to try to help make that case for you.
What is a dual license?
What was referred to previously as dual use licensing is now referred to as the Analytics Modernization Program. So, basically what our QlikView customers can do, is for a small uplift on their annual Qlik the maintenance rate is that they can gain entitlement to Qlik Sense for all of their QlikView users. To progressively modernize, customers can continue using QlikView as they were and start using Qlik Sense for new uses cases. You can transition over time so you don’t have to disrupt anything in relation to Qlik. You keep running those QlikView docs as you were and for new projects and new use cases, start to use Qlik Sense. That is all for a just a modest uplift on the annual QlikView maintenance rate and a move to a subscription model.
What product is best to move to from QlikView, Qlik Sense or Qlik Sense SaaS?
QlikView us on premise and it’s running on hardware that you manage in a data center. The question is, do you jump and go straight up to Qlik SaaS which is basically Qlik Sense in a SaaS managed environment? Or do you just migrate your QlikView architecture to Qlik Sense and continue to manage the architecture yourself and continue to manage the architecture yourself and then that could actually be in a cloud environment, such as Amazon just be in your same data Center where you run QlikView close to your data connections that you have today?
What's important in all this is that Qlik as a company has been focusing heavily on SaaS so we've been putting huge amount of our effort and resources in presenting an industry leading SaaS platform. So, I would urge you to look at that, because of all the capabilities being built out. It's really a main strategic focus for Qlik.
Now the option is you don't need to jump there straightaway. You could migrate to Qlik Sense and continue to manage the architecture, but consider the benefits that when you do move to a SaaS architecture. You no longer need to be worried about architectural decisions and sizing new servers and replacing servers and upgrading servers and management control of the versions, because it all is taken off your hands.
Now it's not it's not a binary you know, yes or no decision. You do need to evaluate your data connections, make sure that your data is available to SaaS. That's probably the first technical requirement. But both are both are there for you to take a look at and both offer all the new enhancements when it comes to Qlik Sense visualizations and capabilities, as well as the more modern architecture so really both are there.
If your data sources are not available to SaaS, we do have distribution tasks that can take that application to SaaS. So, then you can keep your data sources on premise if you’re not planning to move them to SaaS right now. You move this to a modern platform on premise that you manage yourself, but then you can put your users on SaaS. So when you do this, you do leverage a lot of that investment. We did invest a lot in terms of enabling new use cases for SaaS such as Alerting, reporting and collaboration.
There’s actually an app push that’s available straight from QlikView too. So, either way, you can push your Qlik apps, push your data and make it available to both platforms or all three platforms. You can upload and consume the QlikView docs alongside Qlik Sense in the Qlik Sense hub. There’s quite a bit of flexibility here.
From a detailed perspective, we are going to see customers take advantage of the baby steps by pushing apps from Qlik Sense or QlikView to Qlik cloud. They’ll also want to take advantage some bigger bang steps if it’s a small estate. We may be able to schedule a month or two and get the whole thing done and not thing. Overarching in that theme, to keep in mind, that if you are doing a strategic move, it doesn’t usually happen overnight. I would want our customers to think about all the modern investment that’s gone into Qlik SaaS. If it’s not going to be overnight and you’re going to start a project towards this, it is worth knowing where your vendor is going, where the investments going, so that you can land in the same kind of place. There are baby steps to get there throughout.
Can you talk a little about Qlik Sense Mobile?
We have been investing heavily on mobile lately. We are in the final stages of finishing our testing and releasing a brand new mobile app for Qlik Sense on SaaS. If you do migrate over to Sense and then eventually you start using SaaS and deploy your applications software users, you’re going to tap into a different set of capabilities that we have available on SaaS. So, Qlik Sense mobile is definitely one of them. What we did was an integration between the analytics part with the alerting part of the platform where users are going to have applications on their devices. They can just use the application connecting online to the instance where the application is deployed on SaaS. Then those users would have options to create alerts, data alerts based on the changes in the data stores where they receive push notifications on their device. So truly just migrating that usage from a very passive way of “I have to go there and check for things” to a more modern way of the products actually looking for the outliers and the things that I actually created with the conditions, giving me a proactive notification of those events. Then I can go there, do the analysis right there on my device. The goal is for people to make a quick decision based on data and then continue on with their work. It’s a nice way of shifting that reactive usage of analytics to a more proactive and active intelligence way of using analytics.
What about those customers who have already paid an uplift for Dual use in the past? How can they move to subscription or SaaS in a cost-effective way?
The first thing I would do is connect with our Analytics Modernization team. You can reach them at ampquestions@qlik.com and see how flexible they might be to help with that.
Is Qlik planning to offer SaaS version managed by clients in their private cloud environment like GCP?
We do have plans to enable the environment for SaaS microservices that have to be managed by customers. Specifically, GCB, we have to check into that.
Is it possible to have a hybrid solution with Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense SaaS to cover limits of SaaS (for example, no Task Chaining and limited app size)? I think an architecture with scheduler on prem and a distribution policy to distribute apps on Qlik Cloud. Is it possible it?
Yes, it is. There is a feature in the Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows product that allows you to create a distribution policy whereby if a Qlik app is reloaded in your regular Qlik Sense environment, it’ll get auto synced up to a pre-configured tenant. There’s a license feature that needs to be enabled in your license so that the tenant can receive that application. The benefit there is as your app is reloaded on-prem in your data center, it gets pushed up to the tenant and you can reroute users to come through your tenant now to consume those same applications that were reloaded on-prem.
That same principle applies to QlikView as well. So the programmatic distribution of applications, whether they're in QlikView or Qlik Sense, can be pushed up to the cloud. You can have a mixed mode where maybe you link back to an on-premise site for a couple applications that are hard to move over for whatever reason. So both platforms, and both platforms combined as well, you can link all of them. You’re not hindered into one deployment profile.
To see a QlikView document in Qlik Sense SaaS, please see the recording at 28:10.
QlikView to Qlik Sense Migration tool is not picking layered features in Objects. Do we have any plan to implement the same in near future?
I don’t believe I’ve heard of anything in this area. One thing that can serve a certain number of these use cases where you have layered objects that conditionally show/hide, is the container object which was added to Qlik Sense as a native object. It works in a similar way to a QlikView container object, where you associate a number of objects to occupy the same real estate. Depending on conditions, only one of the views will show at a time.
I think the nature of the two products in terms of how you lay out and how you create your dashboards are very different. So, the benefits of that difference is in Qlik Sense, you we have responsive design. So, whatever you design there adapts to different screen sizes and formats of consumption. In situations like this, the layer on top of layer becomes an issue in terms of being flexible and being responsive. So, I think this is definitely something that makes a big difference between how you create the visualization in the dashboard aspect of your applications.
I would say that the majority of the cases that I’ve seen in the past, where you have something very, very specific in terms of layering and creating things on top of things, there's also the possibility for you to create Qlik Sense mash ups. So, they're pretty much like a web page that you can use different technologies and different ways of developing to accomplish something similar. But in terms of like a migration of the exact look and feel of the QlikView application to Qlik Sense that it's not something that we are currently planning for.
One of my concerns is that our QlikView apps access SAP via the connector. What should we watch out for as we move those apps into the SaaS environment?
When it comes to the SaaS edition, we have added some connectivity to tenants. So that if you’re a Qlik Sense tenant in the SaaS environment, there is the SAP BW connector and the SAP SQL connector. Read through what’s on the Help and you can make an assessment whether you’re 100% only using those connectors and thereby could be ready or whether you have to go elsewhere. If the connectivity you are looking for is not available on SaaS, we also have the distribution tasks. You can continue to reload the data on premise, push the data to SaaS and then leverage that data there.
Keep in mind, with any of these direct connect activities that you have firewall access to your source system and that you don't have to break any company firewall paradigms that are in place today. We want to make sure you're able to connect to these in a safe and secure way. So, keep in mind both the firewall aspect, as well as, which connectors you're actually using in your SAP environment.
When you are ready to convert an app from QV to QS what is your typical process? Do you use the converter tool or just rebuild the front end in QS?
This is a great opportunity to review what you have done. It could be that it’s an app that is old and there are different ways of using the same app. I think this is the perfect opportunity for reviewing what you have there to see if it still makes sense. One of the tools I’d recommend for this is the Governance Dashboard inside of QlikView. That'll get a sense of what the sessions are for that application, whether the people are actually using it, and whether it's trending up or down. That will allow you to rationalize your deployment and start to put them into buckets, sort of high usage, important applications, ones that are that are waning over time.
The Governance Dashboard does have a score of how easy it is to move those visualization objects. I think you need to take that as a first start but don’t take that score as Gospel. The reason for that is, we’re adding enhancements when it comes to visualizations every release.
In terms of the actual mechanical steps, this is where I think it makes sense to think about “what am I trying to accomplish?”. Because you can't get the same density of information, inside of Qlik Sense, as you can QlikView. There are reasons for that you know mobility or responsive design. So you're not going to be able to get the exact same visualization expression, but you can start to build out different workflows. You need to consider how are people analyzing the data and what is a reasonable way for them to consume the data as opposed to some of the gnarly things people do inside of QlikView. You only have one sheet viewable and everything else is conditionally show/hidden. You have to think about why you are doing that. Is it you’re trying to force selections? Is it a guided experience?
I’d honestly start out by just binary loading the application getting the model in start to think through the workflow. If you need some bootstrapping for the for the visualization elements to QlikView converter is excellent. It'll bootstrap your process, but you still need to go through an analysis, where you think through the users experience of consuming data, and how can that be more easily ported over and adapted inside of Qlik Sense.
The Help topic is actually under the SaaS editions of Qlik Sense. Even if you're not going to use SaaS, if you're going to just use Qlik Sense, it's worth going here. There's a whole section on moving from QlikView to Qlik Sense. It does cover the journey to SaaS but it's also going to cover the conversion. It’s not 10 steps and you’re done. There is going to be some decision making on whether the app is worthwhile, whether there’s some changes that can be made, what’s the flow going to look like. Unless you control your environment and your budgeted time, you may need to sell the whole concept of moving to Qlik Sense. That’s a slightly different topic but I did want to bring it up.
If you do find yourself having to sell “why would we move our users over to Qlik Sense”, some of the of major new use cases which are profoundly better and more powerful and Qlik Sense is the governed self-service. That’s the drag and drop environment. If you're doing shared objects in QlikView it is just a wonderfully more amazing experience and Qlik Sense to have business users drag and drop in the environment through a governed library of master items dimensions and measures. That has made things infinitely more easy. There's no need to install anything, it's just 100% browser based. Use your Chrome browser, Firefox, connect to the server and start authoring. All the data connections are centrally managed so it makes it easier for the administrators to govern what data users can connect to and make sure there's server power behind that connectivity.
If you have really large data, Qlik Sense actually does provide solutions for both the near real time data situation and the large data volumes situation. We use on demand app generation, dynamic views and a custom approach called session Apps, which are all valid and used today in production by some of Qlik’s largest companies. These aren't available in QlikView, where we have to preload a lot of data, or we have to loop and reduce, create hundreds of different apps. It's a much heavier architecture to try to do a lot of data through QlikView or near real time to QlikView, and this is much better and much more improved in Qlik Sense. So, these are two sellable assets to convince your users and management that you do want to modernize your Qlik platform and release a new front end.
Finally, there's the mashups which, and I am a web developer, but although competent and exceptional web developers I know have told me for many years it's just much better in Qlik Sense both from a security standpoint, as well as the flexibility standpoint. Deploy the absolute killer front ends to your customers, your customers customer’s. You’ll just get the most out of your Qlik environment if you if you're doing mashups and Qlik Sense, these are three major new amazing use cases in Qlik Sense that just are not going to be put back into QlikView at this point of time.
What does that score in the Governance Dashboard represent?
It’s trying to give you a rough directional sense of the rank order of how easy it is to move over. Is this a used application that has an appropriate level of object density or do we have things that are layered on top of each other, which require a bit more work to consider it, what's the compatibility of the objects and about the sheet object usage. It gives you a rough rank ordering of what the profile of the app.
Can we get per sheet object usage from QlikView Governance Dashboard which will help during the sense migration?
You should be able to if you’re on one of the latest versions of the dashboard. Please see the recording at 49:40.
Compared to QlikView, what does Qlik Sense load into memory when opening an application for the first and subsequent times?
It works a lot like QlikView. So, the default with Qlik Sense is that if you reload an app, and nobody’s in the app, the APP gets loaded into memory the first time someone uses it. So the first time, someone opens the app, it gets pulled from the disk up into memory, which is a lot like QlikView.
To make that first experience better, especially if you have a large app and there's a long lag time to lift it into memory, there is a tool called Cache warming, which was a done in QlikView and it's also done and Qlik Sense. So, the cache warmer is a utility you'll actually find it on the EA power tools blog and it will show you how to lift your Qlik Sense app into memory before your first user gets in. That way, their experience with Qlik Sense opening the app is always consistent, barring any architectural limitations. It won’t depend on if it had just been reloaded or not, it will just open in same time because something behind the scenes is automatically lifting in into memory before the user.
In QlikView, we can receive notifications by email through the QMC for reload failures. Do we have this option in Qlik Sense?
In Qlik Sense SaaS, it is native. In on premise Qlik Sense, this is available through Qlik Alerting, which is a value-added product.
How do we get ramped up on Qlik Sense SaaS?
I don’t know how most people learn but I learn by doing. So, signing up for a trial is easy. You can get a trial for Qlik Sense Business on the website. Just put in an email and go to town. Start to explore, start using the functionality. If you want a more representative example of an enterprise deployment, you can reach your Sales contact that can work on getting an evaluation tenant. The support folks have been putting out a lot of content around using SaaS. So please do a review of all the Support Techspert Thursdays. The marketing team puts out high quality videos on new functionality in the Connect and Learn button (the green Q) in the tenant.
When you hit your SaaS tenant, you will immediately land in the cloud hub and there is a number of links and content that is actually seated there for you to immediately jump into, knowledgebase articles and relevant videos and the like. You’ll certainly see a number of actions you can take to consume more information on the cloud experience. So, lots of interaction as soon as you hit the hub.
Do we upload data to Managed Spaces, or should data connections just be added to Shared Spaces? It appears the Space is included in the filepath in the load script so assuming that when a Managed Space Published App is reloaded it just refers to the Shared Space data. Therefore, is there any purpose for uploading data / creating data connections in a managed Space.
This question would be better answered on our Talk to Experts Tuesday session for Qlik Sense SaaS. The session is on May 4th at 10 am EDT. You can register here and we hope to see you there!
The help manual states that On Demand Apps cannot be Published, so how will this functionality work in reality if you publish the aggregated app to a managed space. Is it possible to open up a demand app from an aggregated app within a managed space?
This question would be better answered on our Talk to Experts Tuesday session for Qlik Sense SaaS. The session is on May 4th at 10 am EDT. You can register here and we hope to see you there!
