Qlik November Releases

[Pamela_Whitney]

Hello All Qlik Customers,

November has been a busy month for Qlik Sense releases.  So, as we embark upon the holiday season, we want to take a moment to highlight those new releases.

Major releases

Qlik Sense November 2019 introduces expanded cloud connectivity, new visualization capabilities, enhancements to cloud hub, reporting improvements and more.  To learn more about what this release has to offer, please be sure to visit our Qlik Product Innovation Blog.  For additional details, including product defect fixes, please review the release notes here.

Qlik Sense NPrinting 2019 introduces the Qlik NPrinting Migration tool, Improvements in On-Demand Reporting and Variable logic. To learn more about this release, including product defect fixes, please review the release notes here.

Qlik Sense Patches
During the month of November, we have also released a number of Qlik Sense patches as shown below.

Qlik Sense November 2018 Patch 7 -  details on included fixes can be found here
Qlik Sense February 2019 Patch 5 -  details on included fixes can be found here
Qlik Sense April 2019 Patch 4 -  details on included  fixes can be found here
Qlik Sense June 2019 Patch 5 -  details on included  fixes can be found here
Qlik Sense September 2019 Patch 1 -  details on included fixes can be found here

As always when upgrading any software, make sure that you backup your system and applications before doing any installation and follow upgrading best practices. Thank you for choosing Qlik software.

We wish you a Happy Holiday Season!

Kind Regards,

Global Support

[warfollowmy_ver]

Robert99 , 

How many users and documents do you have in the company? Maybe you just don’t understand that other clients have done too much and it will be too hard to switch to QS. Someone does not need QS just ideologically. Someone is completely satisfied with QV, but the world is changing and some new products are missing.

It is completely incomprehensible why it was necessary to create a new radically different conceptually product, and not modify the old one.

If QV will no longer develop, it is again unclear why pay for support? Let QT honestly talk about the prospects of QV for the coming years so that customers understand the situation and can make a decision, and not draw conclusions from the comments on the forum or guess about the prospects from the frequency of QV updates.

[robert99]

@warfollowmy_ver

Qlik still are developing and supporting QV. Just not as much as you want. And for me the reasons why Qlik moved to Sense (that annoyed me a lot at first) are justified. If they had stayed with View they would on a path of a slow (or maybe fast) decline. Now they should survive and do well.

But my post was directed to another user. Who said they were moving to PBI.

[devan9876]

Robert99

I think a point of frustration is that they seem to market them as if they are two separate products with separate purposes and separate target audiences (Qlikview being for guided analytics and Qliksense being for self service analytics).

If that's the case then one would think they would continue to develop both products, but they don't really, at least not in the way users want. The updates to Qlikview are mostly in the form of under the hood stuff rather than front end features/functionality which is generally what people are referring to when they ask if Qlikview is still being developed. At the end of the day there isn't much a developer can do in the latest version of Qlikview that they couldn't do in the previous version or the version before that.

Rather than them being two separate products with separate purposes it seems more like they want people to drop Qlikview as soon as possible and switch over to Qliksense which would be fine if Qliksense was a complete substitute but from my perspective it seems like we're kind of in this awkward phase where there are aspects of Qlikview that are better and aspects of Qliksense that are better. 

[sspe]

We are the ones moving from QlikView to Power BI, and we have been on QlikSense 🙂 (I've also worked with Qliksense in another company for some years ago).

We just found that it still doesn't do a very good job and that together with a NPrinting not being any better either (we haven't tried NPriting 19 though) made the decision fairly easy. 

We know that Power BI isn't the perfect tool either, but looking forward it seems like Microsoft have a better momentum in developing and adding new features to Power BI than Qlik has with QS. 

I also agree on the inputs from  Devan9876, and personally I also feel that Qlik is spending a lot of ressources and effort on a lot of things like buying new companies, trying to build a new "eco system" with other products etc., rather than maintaining and developing their core products and keep their existing customers happy.  I fully understand that this is their business strategy and all due respect for that, but then they are just loosing customers like us that was quite happy with Qlikview and the features that product had.

If QlikSense had been a new and modernised version of Qlikview we would have been a happy customer and stayed with Qlik. With QlikSense being a completely new product - (that also have taken ages to get to a decent level of functionality), we just feel that Power BI is a better match.

[spcpeters]

I agree with Sspe. Our team is quite Qlikview-focused still. While Sense for sure has its uses in the domain of single-purpose and self-service dashboards, it fundamentally lacks the design freedom required to build complex management dashboards. The only way to get the same level of design and interaction would be to go to mash-ups, which is just so much more complex than just building inside the Qlikview IDE. Fully migrating to Qlik Sense would require us to fundamentally dumb down most of our dashboards. It's like Qlik never talked to customers on how they are actually using Qlikview.

I think it's also quite telling that Qlik is now relying on external companies to come up with new visualizations and extensions even for Sense. It's like they have given up on innovation and are now purely focusing on optimizing the revenue and value of the company to please the private equity firm that bought them.

Sense is surely not a bad product, but it is a different product. It does different things. If we are being forced to migrate because Qlikview is not really getting any useful features, then all options are back on the table.

[robert99]

@devan9876 

"products with separate purposes and separate target audiences (Qlikview being for guided analytics and Qliksense being for self service analytics)"

That's what Qlik claimed. But QlikSense is also fine for guided analytics (it does lack triggers though but I mostly stopped using them with View as it annoyed some power users). In fact QSCB didn't have self-service (QSB does) so these users had no choice.

But I see Qlik Sense as more of a totally cloud based product if required (its what I prefer now) whereas View as a desktop product that can be uploaded to the cloud and used by a View reader?  But Sense also can cater for managed self service at various levels. View can't. And if the future is the cloud and managed self service (and I believe it is) then the focus on Sense is understandable.

"If that's the case then one would think they would continue to develop both products".

They are though. And Qlik have given a commitment to continue doing so. But have made it clear their main focus now is on Sense, SaaS and the cloud now.

"Rather than them being two separate products with separate purposes it seems more like they want people to drop Qlikview as soon as possible and switch over to Qliksense"

I don't see this. Qlik obviously would prefer everyone to swap across (lower costs) but they accept that some users want to continue with View and they fully accept and understand this. But with the proviso that the main development focus is now on Sense.

[robert99]

Hi @sspe

I hope it works out well for you.

But I'll respond to your post because i completely disagree with it. And I do know PBI very well. Ive followed the products progress closely (but so much has been done I sometimes miss stuff) for almost 4 years. I read about all the PBI releases and test a number of features every month. And I've read a number of books on PBI and lots of articles.

"Just found that it still doesn't do a very good job".

This for my requirements is nonsense. Its better than PBI in almost every area that is important to me. Including speed. It faster to upload data, faster to develop an App from scratch and faster to set up a sheet/page. And I also feel the user experience is much better too. Moving to PBI would feel like a step down. Yet if Qlik didn't exist I would probably go for PBI so it's not a bad product. Just not as good as Sense.

"We know that Power BI isn't the perfect tool either"

Its far from it. I cover this in my detailed report comparing Qlik Sense to PBI. One area I will mention is the confusing PBI design decisions. Like launching a cloud based solution  where the set up work (ETL and measures creation) has to be done on the desktop (why and this decision may be hard to change otherwise it would have been done by now). Or not allowing the tables created using Data Query to be saved to a separate folder. Once again an annoying and odd design decision

"adding new features to Power BI than Qlik has with QS." Qlik I feel have added features to the main product with more maturity and selectiveness. Not just anything that users or developers ask for. Qlik leaves this to the extensions and thank god for that. Otherwise Sense could become a bit of a confusing collection of hardly ever used features like QV. Or that PBI might have become now. With key features hard to find at times.

"If QlikSense had been a new and modernised version of Qlikview"

The reason why this was not possible or done has been clearly explained. And for me thank goodness Qlik went the route it did. I much prefer Sense to View by a large distance. But View is still available for those that want it. And now the cloud enterprise version can handle both Sense and View. And can (or will be able to) update from the same QVD's (I assume).

"I also feel that Qlik is spending a lot of ressources and effort on a lot of things like buying new companies, trying to build a new "eco system" with other products etc.,"

All essential to give Qlik a total solution I feel. Re allowing QVDs to be read by other products. Once again moving with the times. So if a user loves PBI or Tableau. Not a problem within the Qlik framework using Data Catalyst.

[devan9876]

@robert99 

“That's what Qlik claimed. But QlikSense is also fine for guided analytics it does lack triggers though but I mostly stopped using them with View as it annoyed some power users).”

I am sure it can do Guided Analytics, but I still think that it is a step backwards compared to what QlikView allowed and I am not just referring to the absence of Triggers. If you compare any object whether it’s a bar chart, a text box, or even a button, the objects in QlikView offer the developer a much more finite level of control over the presentation/layout than the ones in QlikSense do. You can change the font style,size and color for titles, axis labels, expression labels and text in chart labels, You can add/style reference lines, add borders, background colors to the chart canvas, sheet background images, overlay object on top of each other ect…

 To my knowledge most of those would require custom built extensions in QlikSense. And don’t get me wrong, I really like the concept of extensions and widgets. They are pretty cool and a lot easier to develop and debug compared to the way extensions are implemented in QlikView, but extensions take additional time to develop and have to be maintained across future releases so they shouldn’t be the goto solution for everything especially not functionality that people are accustomed to having out of the box.

 I would even argue (and this could just be in my head) that some of the graphics in QlikSense look less crisp around the edges compared to QlikView (specifically the bar chart) which I think is believable since QlikSense seems to use HTML Canvas for its rendering which means raster graphics rather than vector.

 “They are though. And Qlik have given a commitment to continue doing so. But have made it clear their main focus now is on Sense, SaaS and the cloud now.”

 I acknowledged that they do technically develop/support QlikView, but just not necessarily in the way customers are asking for. I think people understand the focus is on QlikSense and they don’t really expect QlikView to have a new release every 3 months like QlikSense does. I think most of the people who are currently upset would be thrilled if it got just 1 update a year with actual features. From what I recall the main highlight of the last QlikView update was that they switched to the SKIA library for rendering. but did that change anything for developers? Did they get any new visualizations or styling options or capabilities?I believe the answer is no. Like I said before there is nothing new a developer can do in QlikView November 2018 that they couldn’t do in November 2017 and even if they had released a QlikView November 2019 there still probably wouldn’t be any new capabilities and that is why some people feel like it isn’t being supported.

[fmarvnnt]

I think you're going out of the main road.  Customers and partners are waiting for fixes declared or announced within Novermber release..

[Vinay_Kapoor]

Hi everyone,

I work in the Product Management team at Qlik and manage the QlikView product. I would like to try and address the concerns posted here. At Qlik we feel fortunate that we have a very passionate community and your feedback is very important to us. Here are some things I would like to mention to make sure we are living Qlik’s values and being open and straightforward with you:

1. We have no plans to EOL QlikView and we would NEVER force you to migrate to Qlik Sense. Our investments in QlikView will (in the coming releases) be focused on helping customers reduce cost of ownership of QlikView and benefit from the cloud and Kubernetes based architecture we have developed. Instead of rebuilding QlikView in that architecture, we are releasing these features on a common platform. Imagine a future where there is a common Qlik platform and QlikView/Qlik Sense are just apps on that platform. The Data Catalyst is an app on that platform. NPrinting is an app on that platform. This is the future we envision. Here is what you will see released on QlikView in the coming weeks and months
   • In Nov, we have introduced a capability that allows customers to start deploying and managing QV in cloud (SaaS or Kubernetes) https://blog.qlik.com/the-qlik-sense-november-2019-releaseWhile it is part of Qlik Sense functionality, this is NOT being done to force you to Qlik Sense. It is simply to merge the backend platforms so customers can get benefits from cloud scalability and if they like, then they also get the benefit of Qlik Sense.
   • QlikView service packs will continue to be released as required. 12.40 SP2 is expected late Jan/early Feb 2020. Attached  is a  list of all  issues  expected to be delivered.
   • QlikView 12.50 will be released early Q2 2020 and does include new features. For e.g. the publisher which is part of 12.50 release will allow for distribution of QV documents from on-prem deployment to a Kubernetes or cloud based deployment, allowing you to optimize your cost and investment on existing QV deployments
   • 

2. Over the last 5 years, the market has moved heavily towards self-service and cloud and is now in the midst of a move towards Augmented Intelligence. Our investments in Qlik Sense reflect that shift in the market, and all our tools and messaging around migration between QlikView and Qlik Sense are targeted exclusively at those customers and partners who have needs for some of these capabilities.

3. For those of you who have mentioned the lack of capabilities in Qlik Sense as a hindrance towards the move of your QlikView assets to Qlik Sense attached  is a list of things we have released in 2019 to address feature gaps

I hope this  helps.

Regards,

Vinay Kapoor,.

Sr  Director of Product Management