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Qlik Insider webinar content is shared after airing on the Qlik Product Spotlight where you can access a host of other popular product-specific on-demand webinars and demo videos. We encourage you to take advantage of Qlik Product Spotlight, as it will help you stay informed on all of the exciting things that are possible with Qlik product portfolio.
As always each Qlik Insider webinar has a live Q&A panel giving you access to our team of experts and just as we did for the third Qlik Insider session, we’d like to share an overview of the hot ticket items that our audience had questions on.
The Q4 Qlik Insider webinar focused on the two most recent updates – September 2019 and November 2019: https://community.qlik.com/t5/Qlik-Sense-Enterprise-Documents/New-to-Qlik-Sense-Topics-You-Need-to-K...
Once more, I used my Qlik Sense app to help me consolidate all the questions received from across each of the regional webinars (Americas, Asia Pacific and EMEA). Fun Fact: we had a 35% increase in the total number of questions from the Q3 webinar.
New Data Visualization Enhancements
Qlik Sense November 2019 release saw the introduction of a new native data visualization object, the Mekko Chart, also known by other names such as Marimekko chart, Mosaic plot or Mondrian diagram and is commonly used in finance and marketing use cases.
And we had great feedback on the further functionality improvements over the last two releases;
- Table styling - more control when creating tables, change font sizes and color in headers and cells.
- Accumulated measures in graphs - Now it’s as simple as ticking a checkbox option to accumulate measures in Bar Chart, Line Chart, Combo chart and Tables rather than writing expressions (which you can also still do – whatever works best for you)
- Increased search limit on Filter Panes, we have increased the search limit from 255 characters to 5,000 characters, allowing more values to be selected in bulk.
- Trellis container now supports two dimensions, for more details on using Trellis containers please see this design blog and video
We also received questions on the availability of more data visualizations, we are continually working on improving and bringing new visualizations with each release. One example is around the use of a Sunburst chart, which although is not native functionality, however, our Pie Chart has an option to create radius dimensions which mimics a sunburst– read more details on this, in Qlik online help
If you have ideas for future improvements – you can submit them to Qlik Product team on the Qlik community - Qlik Sense Ideas
QlikView – The love for QlikView is still strong and as a QlikView customer it’s your choice whether you stay with QlikView, deploy Qlik Sense alongside your QlikView environment or migrate to Qlik Sense entirely. Whichever path you choose we want your experience to be as smooth as possible.
One of the latest updates that was particularly liked is the ability to upload QlikView apps to Qlik Sense Cloud hub, either by using Qlik Sense Enterprise when it is deployed on Kubernetes or on Qlik Cloud Services which you can choose to do as part of your subscription. Right now, the ability to upload QlikView apps is available only through the cloud editions of Qlik Sense and is a manual process. Automation will appear in the next phase and we are looking to add support to Windows in 2020 - so keep watching for updates on this exciting capability.
Qlik Data Catalyst for QVDs - Qlik Data Catalyst is a game-changer in democratizing data within your organization helping you solve your data integration challenges of making raw data available as business-ready analytic data to all your users. With Qlik Data Catalyst your users can shop for data in enterprise-wide governed data catalogs and feed it into any other BI tool of their choice, yes that’s right, not just QlikView and Qlik Sense! In this session we showed a new product specifically for managing your QVD files with Qlik Data Catalyst for QVD.
Check out the QVD File Organization datasheet for more details on Qlik Data Catalyst for QVDs.
NPrinting – The Qlik NPrinting team continues to work hard improving Qlik NPrinting based on your feedback. Qlik NPrinting November 2019 release saw the availability of the Qlik NPrinting Migration Tool that you can use to convert your QlikView NPrinting 16.3 projects to new apps compatible with Qlik NPrinting 2019 or newer. The tool is built-in and for more details of the tool including what is and is not supported please see the Qlik NPrinting Migration Tool FAQ and the new section on Qlik online help which includes a useful video. As a reminder, QlikView NPrinting 16 end of support is scheduled March 31, 2020.
Multi-Cloud Strategy – Qlik’s multi-cloud capabilities support any use case regardless of where your data is stored or how the Qlik platform is deployed. We want to enable your cloud strategies by giving you the choice in how you deploy your analytics solution and evolve it to include more cloud services at your own pace.
Qlik Sense Business is our recent cloud edition of Qlik Sense, and is our current SaaS offering which essentially offers the same features as those found in Qlik Sense Enterprise – Our cloud editions run on a continuous delivery cycle, with extensions most recently supported. While there are no limits on the number of measures and dimensions for apps in Qlik Sense Business, there are however capacity limits as with any SaaS offering. You can find more details here https://www.qlik.com/us/pricing
As part of our cloud-first strategy, we have built our own Qlik Cloud Services where you can run our cloud editions on. This isn’t something that you buy but it’s the important stuff running behind the scenes. Qlik Sense Business is the first SaaS offering running on Qlik Cloud Services and you can try it for free on a trial basis.
Also, if you have an existing subscription of Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows and want to try cloud you can extend your deployment by connecting to our Qlik Cloud Services as part of your subscription, contact your sales rep for more details.
Stay tuned for further developments on what else can be achieved with our Qlik Cloud Services.
This new cloud-native scalable architecture offers many benefits over the previous architecture that Qlik Sense Basic and Qlik Sense Cloud Business were built upon which is why Qlik Sense Business has replaced these earlier SaaS editions.
Another point to note is that Qlik Sense Business is the same architecture as Qlik Sense Enterprise on Kubernetes which is what you would use to deploy in your own cloud of choice. Both these cloud editions of Qlik Sense allow you to take advantage of new ways of working; the new cloud hub, a new paradigm for collaboration & using “spaces” along with governed management and administration capabilities.
This led to a few questions on what exactly is kubernetes, why use Kubernetes and where can I deploy it?. Kubernetes is a cross platform cloud scalable orchestration architecture, for more details check out https://kubernetes.io/. You can also read our whitepaper on the business value of Containers & Kubernetes and you can deploy Qlik Sense Enterprise on Kubernetes in your own private cloud infrastructure or on a major public cloud vendor such as AWS or redshift. See our technology page for more details
One important aspect of using cloud is security, which is where the use of an IDentity Provider (IDP) is strongly advised to manage authentication of your user base. The good news is that you can have your Qlik environment use Auth0 or Okta for example as an identity provider. Both Qlik Cloud Services and Qlik Sense Enterprise on Kubernetes integrate with an IdP using the OpenID Connect (OIDC) standard.
Natural Language Analytics – We also talked about a new NLP (natural language processing) capability in the Qlik Cognitive Engine that supports natural language search and interaction in Qlik Sense. As users engage with Insight Advisor, they are now able to enter search criteria using full natural language. Currently, NLP is available in English on Qlik Sense Enterprise on Cloud Services or Kubernetes and Qlik Sense Business. Please see the online help page for details. Going forward, natural language interaction will be available in other areas of Qlik Sense as well.
Data Integration Platform – when Attunity joined the Qlik group we become the only vendor to truly offer a full end-to-end platform for the data and analytics supply chain. Data Integration is about enabling DataOps for analytics, taking raw data and making it available as business ready at enterprise scale so it can be used for Data Analytics throughout the entire organization. Qlik’s Data Integration platform covers solutions for Database replication, Data Warehouse automation, and Data Lake Automation - all available on subscription, for more details on check out our Data Integration products page
Qlik Insight Bot – Qlik Insight Bot offers a fast and easy way to ask questions and discover insights also using natural language. It’s available right in Qlik Sense and through popular tools such as Slack, Skype, and Microsoft Teams for more details check out Qlik Insights bot online help page
Accessibility – we received a few questions on how Qlik is working to meet accessibility standards, please visit our Accessibility page.
Advanced Analytics – Did you know you can integrate Qlik into systems like R, Python and DataRobot and so many others? This really extends the possibilities with Advanced Analytics such as Predictive analytics. Please contact your sales rep to discuss your requirements. Also, Qlik Community is a great resource. https://community.qlik.com/
Qlik Associative Big Data Index – Visually explore your biggest data sources using Qlik’s Associative engine. Several improvements were made with the latest release such as building and interacting with charts, an expanded set of expressions that can be used and workflow improvements to the management console. The data sources to be indexed need to be prepared in Parquet format. It was asked whether QVD files were supported to save loading into memory, the best method here would be to use On-Demand App Generation. More details on Qlik’s Big Data Index can be found on the product page.
Qlik Connectors – Qlik has a host of built-in connectors to varied data sources and APIs, most recently we added connectivity to Snowflake and enhanced the Salesforce connector to support recent API changes. Other interesting topics discussed in the chat were Data Encryption and Sentiment analysis
“Help, I need somebody”
We often get support questions on our webinars, but don’t wait until the next webinar if you need help. Most of the time you can find the answer you need on Qlik Community - for example, someone asked about creating different Financial years to suit various periods in Qlik Sense and the answer is out there. If you can’t get the resolution you need on Qlik Community and you need technical support then check out our Qlik Support portal where you can search the knowledge base just by asking a question; and as a paying customer, you can always submit a support request to get assistance from our superhero support team.
What’s new doc?
Well, that’s a wrap for the Qlik Insider webinar series for 2019, I hope to see you again in 2020.
Don’t forget we always produce a plethora of ‘what’s new” content for every new release of our products here on the Qlik Community, so you can always be in the know on the latest product enhancements and innovations. You can even get hands-on with the latest What’s New Qlik Sense demo app and learn some great tips and tricks in our “Getting Started with Qlik Sense” Webinar Series
For a great overview of all the releases of 2019 check out this post on Qlik Community which links to lots of great resources, such as the Qlik Continuous Classroom and the Qlik help site plus a whole host of tips and tricks too.
I’ll leave you with one last tip; If you are just getting started with Qlik, make sure your first step is through the onboarding experience.
Thanks for reading and enjoy the festive season!
- Adam Mayer, Senior Data Evangelist and Innovator at Qlik