Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
Greetings and salutations to your GIANT edition of the Community Highlights and Release Blog! It’s been a few months since we last put one of these out, and we have reasons for that. A lot of the things done during this release have been some pretty major projects and upgrades to the community, so instead of doing some standard monthly changes, we rolled them all together to make sure that they worked well and make a real impact for everyone here! So while this edition might be a bit longer than normal, know that it’s due to us wanting to give you some great updates to functionality and make the community work better for everyone!
Need to Know
Our development team has been working hard the past few months, to the point that we combined our sprints into one quarter long sprint! Due to that we have a ton to talk about. We’ll do our best to cover everything in detail but for anything we miss be sure to check out our Version History.
First, we’ve made a handful of updates to our Events boards, you’ll know them mostly through our User Groups. As we work towards a more direct integration, the RSVP buttons are now directly connected to the event URL and will appear once you’ve RSVP’d to an event. User Group Leaders will also now have the ability to invite users from outside the community to events, so folks who haven’t quite signed up yet can be invited to the fun.
We’ve also made updates to a handful of areas that were all affected by one root issue. For the very observant you might have noticed the number 25 popping up a lot, this is because of an issue we were having with our APIs. We’ve fixed most of these, so now the ACE Program page will show all the members, and the Gallery Partner & Alteryx area will show all its posts. We’ve also removed the post count from the User Group region pages, which were both impacted by this issue but were also removed to help with performance.
We’ve launched and removed a bunch of areas to help keep the Community running smoothly. For archived areas, the Virtual Solution Centers have officially been shut down, as well as the Alteryx Analytics Hub forum, Use Cases, several inactive User Groups and the Recommendation system on the home page. We’ve launched the Program Page, however, to help house off Community programs users can be involved in, which is also the new home of the Pilot Program page. We’ve also released two new interactive lessons for our new products and have updated the Partner Certifications for our partners to streamline their experience.
Rounding out the general updates, we’ve fixed an issue with the podcast's player teaser, so now it should appear no matter what for all your listening needs!
Finally, we have the biggest batch of updates, Public Gallery updates! Starting off we fixed an error with the content type and updated some small user experience issues, so buttons are more cohesive, and everything moves smoothly. We’ve also officially set up our Alteryx Supported status, this will appear as a green checkmark next to the title of a Gallery tool and means that our Support team is able to help troubleshoot any issues you might be having with it. Please note this does differ from items built by Alteryx associates, so be sure it has the checkmark before going to Alteryx Support.
We’ve also updated the cover image behavior so images you include for the from of your items no longer stretch. Finally, we added sorting to both the home and district pages, as well as subscribe buttons for each district as well as the Gallery as a whole.
That was a lot of updates, and we got more coming. To finish this section off, we just wanted to let you know we’re aware of some issues with the Co-Publisher permission as well as the Navigation. We’re looking into both and will update you once we have them fixed!
Community News
If you haven’t heard yet (and how could you not have) – Inspire is coming!!! That’s right, in just a little over a month, we’ll all be getting together IN-PERSON for what’s guaranteed to be fun, informative, and just an all-around memorable time! If you haven’t had a chance to register yet, what are you waiting for? Go do it now.
Speaking of Inspire – there’s some great content on the community that we hope is helping to get you excited for the main event! Our own @LDuane wrote a great blog on her top 10 sessions not to miss at Inspire, we’ve also got Grand Prix Registrations open (and if you’ve participated in the Grand Prix in the past, don’t forget to share your experiences here). Finally, check out some behind the scenes info on @NicoleJohnson's post about her upcoming session at Inspire – you’ll love it if you’re a big fan of either classic horror OR data.
We’ve also got the Alteryx Designer March Madness brackets going on! We’re down to the Final Four now, so don’t forget to check out the progress that’s been made already and get your votes in before the final comes up next week! And don’t forget about our Drive to Survive contest! You still have through the weekend to get your entries in.
I also want to expand a bit on one of the release notes mentioned above to share what it really means for you – the Alteryx Supported check. This is a great new feature in the Community Gallery that is going to make it much more clear for you moving forward what is and what isn’t something you can get help with. Anything that is uploaded by Alteryx is verified as an asset, but some of that content is not continued to be updated and supported. Whenever you see that green check, you can know that if you have an issue with the asset, you can reach out to support to help – it’s a seemingly small change that offers up a WORLD of improvement (and wasn’t actually an easy thing to do – so thanks, team!)
Read and Listen
Across two months we’ve seen LOTS of informative blog posts, but three topics stand out:
- Big product updates, including the 2021.4 release, the Trifacta acquisition, and the launch of the Alteryx Analytics Cloud.
- Server enablement content, including SAML SSO authentication, API V3, and workload management.
- Computer vision tools how-tos, including how to pull data out of nutrition labels, SEC forms, and tax forms.
In February, the Alter Everything podcast turned 100! Well, 100 episodes that is. And technically we've put out more than 100 if you include our Data [in the] Sandbox mini-series, but hey who's counting?
To mark this milestone, we tackled a wide range of topics including how data can help make a case for corporate philanthropy, and how data is used to fight feminicide in Mexico. We also shared three customer success stories focused on the importance of being strategic about digital transformation, and featured a Sparked student user who answered the question you've all been wondering about: "How can I turn my data from 'scrambled eggs' to a 'five-course meal'? Happy listening!
Closing
Well, if you’ve made it this far, CONGRATULATIONS! We know this edition was a doozy but hopefully there was a lot of great information for you in there. Let’s celebrate that we have some awesome new enhancements and it’s starting to get warm and be spring for many of us. And also let’s give a HUGE shoutout to our community platform team that makes all of this work for us! I’m talking to @TreyW, @KylieF, @KirkN, and @sachink– without them this place would be basic as all get out, and that’s certainly not something we want here.
