Add context and drive discussion with Collaborative Notes in Qlik Sense

[QlikSenseUpdates]

The drive towards Active Intelligence continues, helping more people take action in the business moment.  This means moving beyond the dashboard, with action-oriented capabilities that deliver the right insight at the time and place of decision.  One of the most important activities driving active intelligence is collaboration – people working together to share, communicate, and make team decisions, driving the overall collective intelligence of your organization. 

[QlikSenseUpdates]

We have now released Collaborative Notes, a new feature in Qlik Sense that creates a collaborative canvas for users, allowing them to add narrative and context to analytics and create discussions to interact with others around data.  This allows more people to work together to leverage not just what the data says, but also the critical human context and perspective around it. 

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Users can take snapshots of analytics and add text commentary to capture human perspectives around analytics.  They can tag and invite others to discussions, conducting both real-time (synchronous) and offline (asynchronous) communication.  Notes can be stored within apps and also added to collections within the hub, serving as a record of discussion and joint decision-making for your organization.  And of course, at any time users can jump directly back into live analytics apps, in-context, for further analysis. 

With Notes, Qlik Sense further supports team decisions with the critical business context needed for the best outcomes.  Stay tuned as we continue to add exciting new Active BI features to our platform, helping our customers maximize the value of their data and people. 

Resources:

• Can't see the video? Download .mp4 attached to this post
• Collaborative Notes: How to video on Qlik Help YouTube Channel
• Collaborative Notes Documentation
• Do More with Qlik Webinar Registration

[vvalstar]

Great feature. Any chance this will end up on the Qlik Sense for Windows edition?

[oliver_wipro]

@QlikSenseUpdates - not sure if anyone gets a notification if I reference this account, but could you please give us an answer for the question in the previous comment?

[Oliver_F]

Hi,

I had a chance to take a look into the new feature and I am quite disappointed. While your marketing promised "add narrative and context to analytics", this is somehow not really what this feature does.

If I want to add context I want to add context to an object (e.g. an app, a chart, a KPI) - or even better I want to add context to a part of a chart (e.g. one specific bar of an barchart or one specific line of a table).

But your notes are not connected to any of this! They are not even connected to the app. You connected them do spaces! I have no idea how this might be usefull feature in the future.

Just imagine you have a space with only three apps each with only three sheets. If you add only one note per sheet you will already have nine notes in total. This would be ok if you would only see the one note that is related to the sheet that you are looking at the moment, but as you have attached notes to the space, you will see a list of nine notes all the time no matter which app or sheet you have opened.

I really do not see how it is "adding context" when you always present the user each and every note that is available. Because eight of nine notes will not add any context fo the specific sheet / object you are looking at. So basically you are distracting the user with plenty of useless information so that the user is going to miss that one note that actually is adding context.

There have been extensions available for years that provide way better ways of adding context and it would have been nice if you would have developed a feature that based on already existing usecases instead of coming up this.

Maybe I am to harsh and have not discovered the real purpose of Qlik Notes yet, so please help me to understand how this feature is usefull.

[Andrew_Kruger]

Hey @Oliver_F , thank you for sharing you initial perspective on Notes - candid feedback always welcome.  The use cases you reference are also valid and something that we as a team will continue to evaluate; specifically, annotation (of a specific data point) of a chart, or inline comments on an Object. 

Many of our customers use Spaces to host many  apps that either, span different lenses of a specific business theme (e.g. sales) or, support a broader organization (e.g. production Space with approved business line apps).  We believe that business problems are solved by humans combining their expertise (narrative) and observation of the data (multiple visualizations from a single app or more) in a collaborative forum (a Note).  So yes, Notes unapologetically has the scope of a Space to support the collective findings of the humans working with the data within it. For a more visionary perspective on this check out Elif Tutuk's  Collective intelligence in Unleashing the "Power of Many" with Active Intelligence. 

Your comment on the volume of Notes ("distracting") in the Hub experience is fair.  Working with our customers we are identifying short-term and long-term improvements to ensure that only the most important and relevant Notes are visible for a user.  Certainly welcome your participation in this discussion, please add your thoughts via the community Ideation and feel free to reach out to me via Community DM. 

Thanks again for taking the time to share - look forward to hearing more from you on Notes as we mature the capability!

[Andrew_Kruger]

@vvalstar  & @oliver_wipro  Confirming that Notes is only available on Qlik Sense on SaaS.