Attention Academic Program members, the newest updates to Qlik Sense Business (cloud editions) were released this month. For information on all the changes, visit the post from the Product Innovation Team on Community, Qlik-Sense-Product-Release-March-2020
The main change you will see is how to share apps with others. Rather than sharing apps from your personal space, apps will need to designated to one of your shared spaces in order to be shared to others.
This is really poor Qlik doing this especially with such short notice. And doing it after all the recent changes. For example I only converted to QSB less than 6 months back. Now another big (money driven?) change.
And it completely and utterly limits the sharing ability for QSB. It was unlimited sharing. Now its restricted to 5 streams. And almost no time to prepare for it.
And no reason given for doing it. It shows a total disregard for the paying customers as I assume Qlik feels they are locked in. This attitude is all well and good in the short term but what about new customers and Qlik's reputation as a upfront and reputable business? Especially coming so soon after all the other recent changes. Where maybe unwritten agreements were disregarded when the free offering were dropped. With almost no notice in regard to the free cloud.
And this is after recently doubling the price and forcing user off one product to a new one. Yes the new product is much better and the price increase was delayed for current users so fair enough but now the strange process of slowly cutting back the new products offering (QSB). And giving users no time to prepare for it.
I assume this change is a money driven decision by trying to force customers onto QSE. As private sharing is working very well. But how much more money will it generate. I doubt very little. If the company in question is forced to move to QSE I will either drop low use users. Or group users into one low use group. And drop self service (no ones really using it anyway) and only have 1 or two power user licenses. A quick calculation shows it works out at less than at present based on 20 users at full cost.
I hope Qlik reconsiders this decision. Its fine for QSE as there are unlimited stream. Its not OK for QSB.
But if not Qlik need to be more upfront on why this is being done. Its there a future for QSB. Or is this the start of the end. A first step to force users to QSE?
And maybe you can suggest how I can explain this change to my Qlik customer. A customer who has been from Qlik cloud from the beginning and is now sharing Apps with their customers based on private App sharing.
Thanks for reaching out! The decision to make the sharing change is based on customer feedback. We do appreciate your feedback though and we will pass it along to the product team.
I'm going to explain the reason why I feel this is a bad decision (and direction) by Qlik. That is dropping features because some Customers don't use them or like them. In the hope that you will not do it for this change. But also in the future not drop other features. As dropping this feature (and in future other features or charts etc that I use) will have a big adverse impact on my QSB client. It will mean they have to set up another QSB. Or upgrade to QSE. And this so soon after all the other change. They will not be happy especially at this time.
Qlik has two products. I'm almost certain that the Customers who don't use (or like the idea of) private sharing are using QSE. Its fine for them as they have unlimited streams. It not fine for QSB. If Qlik are going to continue with QSB they should consider this as a stand alone important product that isn't changed and downgraded to suit QSE.
Qlik should not be dropping features because of some Customers views and completely disregarding the impact on other Customers. Even if these Customer are smaller. Doing this is not a good look. Especially for the smaller Customers who will rightly feel they are unimportant in the Qlik world
Why drop a great feature anyway. It makes nil sense to me. It's there and its working so why can't Customers just not use it. As I don't use many charts. I just ignore them. Or alternatively allow those Customers who don't want this feature to switch it off but keep it for Customers who want it. But in general don't remove features full stop. Unless replaced by a better feature that does the same thing.
And thanks for any help you can have to change this.
Hi @robert99 Thanks for raising this. It appears there has been a miscommunication on what this change entails and how it affects Qlik Sense Business users. This change was in no way financially driven. It was a trade-off decision made based on feedback, analysis of usage and our intention to always guarantee the best possible performance within our products.
First, let me clarify what is changing in about a month from now. Currently, users can share apps directly from their Personal Space with other users. After the change user will need to move an app to a Share or Managed Space to share an app. There is no change in who can have access to apps or how many users a customer will need to buy. There is no new limit on sharing either. All users can access as many apps as desired. The technical change we had to make here is about the fact that security (which does include App Sharing) is now always set on top of Spaces rather than on individual Apps.
This allows us to increase the capabilities to make it easier to distribute, manage, and share apps at scale into our SaaS products. But in order to make these key changes to support a capability in high demand, there was a need to change app sharing from the Personal Space. When we looked at the usage of Personal Shape app sharing the data told us this was not a very popular capability. While we would have preferred get the best of both world, it wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for your feedback and as we always try to improve, when we make changes in the future, we will endeavour to do a better job explaining the reasons behind the change.
Please let me know if you have any further questions on that topic.
"After the change user will need to move an app to a Share or Managed Space to share an app."
One initial question.
What do Qlik sense Business users do if they have already used up their 5 Shared Spaces. QSB users can't set up Managed Spaces. And they are restricted to 5 shared Spaces. So what then. I have shared three Apps outside the shared space setting. And plan to do a lot more. What am I now supposed to do now?
And at this point I would definitely prefer not to upgrade to QSE. It would be another upheaval for my client. And they are still on the lower fee and haven't allowed for this in their budget. I also want them to start using self service more (I'm in the process of trying to arrange training) but at US$70 / user / month its just too expensive. Especially compared to US$15 / user / month. But its a big increase even at the new QSB price of US$30 / user / month. So effectively Self Service would be out the window. For good.
When you are talking about "they have already used up their 5 Shared Spaces", are we talking about a scenario where they do have the need for more than 5 individual user groups to work with different Apps / different content ? As the amount of Apps and amount of users is not limited within a Shared Space as you know. It's only the fact that you can't use more than 5 different sets of users as this is limited by the amount of Shared Spaces within the QSB tier. And even within the Shared Space you can invite some of those people to only consume, while others can contribute and continuously work together on the App. That is a capability which is not even possible if you only share (read only) an App out of a Personal Space.
I'm happy to jump as well on a call with you where we can talk more in detail about those scenarios and use cases.
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