Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
We've got a release this month that's absolutely chock-full of updates for you; you might even call it a… Mega Release. And with this Mega Release, we figured what better theme to go along with this month than everyone's favorite blue bomber, Mega Man! Before we get into it, know that there is a lot of stuff coming down the pipeline beyond what we're talking about here, so get ready for lots of information to be thrown at you, and always comment on the blog if you need any further clarity around something. With all that being said, let's begin!
Need to Know
This release was a ‘mega’ life for the development team, and we’re excited to say it’s paid off with a lot of new features and functions to talk about. To help keep this concise, however, we’re going to breeze through a few quality-of-life updates. If you have any questions or want to go in further about some of the new features feel free to ping @KylieF and she’d be happy to chat in more detail.
Firstly, the User Group migration. You may have noticed the Groups & Events part of the community was out of commission for the better part of a day on September 1st. This was because we were completing a mass migration to the newest version of Groups! This means a lot of new features, new behaviors and mostly a new user experience. Since this is such a big update, we’re going to go into more detail in the Community News section of this release notes, but we’re excited to show you all the cool new features we’ve set up for the area.
Our second big update is the launch of a brand-new area in the Community, SparkED | Education. This area part of our new initiative SparkED that we announced back at Virtual Inspire. Students, Educators and Job Changers will all have a new space to chat, up their skills and be supported in their plans to further their development and education. You can find this area under our Learn category.
Our final big new functionality is our ‘Was This Helpful’ feedback. This new feature will appear at the bottom of all Knowledge Base articles and will allow users to give a yes or no feedback response to the article. Percentages will also appear on these articles to show how many users found the article useful in their search for knowledge. For users who didn’t find the information presented as helpful as it could have been, you’ll also be able to provide a written reason why so we can further improve our knowledge articles.
As for quality-of-life updates, we completed a lot of bug fixes. The ICS calendar invite is no longer an hour ahead of when it should be, we’ve updated some terms on our Data Science Portal to be a bit clearer, and our recommendation engine feedback option now has a hover! We’ve officially have also decided that we can no longer support the browser Internet Explorer. Users on that browser will now see a banner explaining as such and a recommendation to move to Chrome, Firefox or Edge.
Lastly, we’ve seen a few reports about notifications showing an incorrect, almost comical amount of 101. We’re currently looking into this and will let you know when we have the issue fixed.
Community News
This month's Community News portion is going to be short and sweet, because of all of the awesome platform improvements included above, but there are definitely a few things I'd like to point out to everyone! Firstly, if you haven't had a chance yet, check out @lharder_AFG's post about Leading Positive Societal Impact through Empathetic Leadership in General Discussions. It's a great look into how social responsibility is being taken seriously in the corporate world, and has a great question around how your organization may be contributing!
Now on to User Groups! As mentioned earlier, there was a massive update to our Groups and Events section of the community. There's some great new functionality that took a lot of behind the scenes work to make sure things went smoothly, so MAJOR shout outs to everyone that worked on the launch. With this new feature, each group will now have discussions as well as event listings available. We're still working on some process around that, so if you don't see a lot there immediately, not to worry! We'll be ramping up usage of the feature soon and you'll be able to see just how great it's going to make the experience of being a member of an Alteryx User Group (and if you're not already in one, check out the listings and see if there's one near you). Also be sure to check out the resources over the next few weeks, as we'll be adding more details on the updates and functionality! In other User Group news, we've had some really great meetings for some groups that are just starting out! The first LATAM User Group Meeting was held - so if you're a Spanish speaker, this is a great opportunity to interact with and check out some of the great people and work around the world.
We've also got a big day coming up soon, so be on the lookout for another new blog next week to celebrate something that only happens but once a year! They grow up so fast.
Read and Listen
Alteryx Designer 2021.3 dropped in August and you know what that means: plenty of blogs to get you up to speed. Start with the announcement, then learn the new keyboard shortcuts, move on to familiarize yourself with the brand new Computer Vision tools, and finish by thanking your community peeps for their great ideas that made this release possible. (Of course, there’s more. Check out the rest of the August blogs here.)
This month for your listening pleasure, Alter Everything brings you stories of using data and analytics for industries a little off the beaten path: sports and filmmaking. Then Data Science Mixer brings it back closer to home work with lessons for HR analytics and supply chain.
Finally, we may need to change the name of this section to "Read, Listen & Watch" because we’ve added a new area to watch Inspire presentations. So far, we’ve added the 2021 ACE presentations, but we’ll be adding more over the coming weeks.
Final Thoughts
Whew, that was a jam-packed blog this month. Hot reploid summer is almost over and we're getting ready to move into some cooler weather (in the northern hemisphere at least). No better time that to start transitioning into a blanket slug on your sofa, picking out your favorite video game, and losing yourself for a few hours in a level that you just can't seem to beat. Just make sure you don't do the thing you did when you were a teenager and also consume a large pizza and twelve pack of Mountain Dew (unless you have some Tums on hand) because as adults, we can no longer get away with that. Don't say I didn't warn you, and I hope that you enjoy all of the awesome new stuff in the community!
