Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
It's that time again, when the world sets its focus on team and individual sports. All eyes are on the Olympic Summer Games, even those that usually have no interest in athletics or organized feats of physical prowess. Many people become overnight experts, sharing their absolutely correct opinions on minute details that, let's be honest, you definitely missed. Where did this expertise come from? No one truly knows, but what we DO know is that this month's blog will definitely be less grating than your acquaintance explaining the intricacies of steeplechase to you as you try to exit the conversation.
Need to Know
In collaboration with our Support team, we’re excited to announce that we have launched a new Support Case Portal experience. This portal will be hosted directly in Salesforce, which ensures that the most current and accurate information is immediately available upon our Support Engineers responding. This also means updated views for all areas of your case management.
On the case submission page, we’ve updated the view to be more concise and to the point and also provide a wider variety of recommended articles that might help resolve your problem early on.
Once your case has been submitted, users will have direct visibility into the case’s status, who is working the case, and all updates as well as being more easily able to supply updates of your own.
We’ve also made sure there’s a clear location where users can view all their open cases, the status of these cases and easily navigate between them.
Most excitingly the case portal is officially available to all Alteryx users! Users can access the case portal by going to the Support board under Support and clicking Open a Case. If your account isn’t associated with a license yet, you’ll be asked to complete a one-time license key verification. Once verified you’ll be set to start on a resolution to your issues with our support team.
While the case portal is the exciting update for the release, we did also complete a few smaller quality of life updates across the community as well. Our previously missing event status’ dropdown has been returned to the Live Training board for easy filtering and navigation. We’ve also corrected a top authors visual bug when on phone or tablet.
We’re looking forward to many exciting things in August, so stay tuned.
Community News
The new case portal is definitely going to be great, so kudos to everyone that worked on that project! I also want to point out some of the happenings in the community that you may have missed since our last issue.
Now, I know the General Forum isn't always your first stop in the community, but there are some definite gems that get posted there and I want to focus on one specifically from last week. @jenniferyuen posted a recording of a webinar about how data-driven decisions and help companies reduce their environmental impact and help address the climate crisis. That makes for a great resource in and of itself, but what I think is really great is the question posed to the community - how you as members of the community are using Alteryx to aid in your company's sustainability efforts. This is of course a fantastic opportunity to share what you're already doing, but also a really thought provoking question about how you could be doing something. Head on over to the thread to check out the recording and jump into the conversation.
I also wanted to highlight another thread that was shared in the General Forum from @LEXQ2005 - One sentence to introduce Alteryx. As community members and Alteryx users, you already know the benefits that you can get from the platform, but many times organizational leadership teams don't know those perks. There are already some great thoughts that have been shared, but this is one of those questions that can benefit everyone at some point. Bonus points because these phrases can be modified for basically any tool that needs to be more widely implemented in an organization. Condensing ideas down to a single sentence is a great thought experiment and really makes you strip away extraneous details.
I know our content section is coming up next, but I wanted to point out a really great feature of our Data Science Mixer podcast that doesn't get enough love - the Cocktail Conversation! For every episode of the podcast, we pose a question to the community that has to do with the topic covered. This month we had two really good ones that you should definitely weigh in on in the comments. The first is on how visualizations have uncovered something previously unnoticed in your data, and the second is all about streamlining and automating time consuming tasks in your life.
Finally, I want to give a big shoutout to our newest Alteryx Designer Expert Certified users! This is a very small group of elite Alteryx users (only 31 worldwide at the moment) that have earned our highest credential from our certification team. If you're considering tackling the Expert Exam but need some inspiration for preparing, head on over to How To ACE the Alteryx Advanced Certification Test by @Ken_Black or Becoming an Alteryx Expert by @cgoodman3. Let's congratulate and shout out all of our new experts below, because that’s a podium finish if I’ve ever heard of one!
Edit: Realized that I missed some people in my earlier congratulatory statement, so now we've got everyone from 2021 that's passed the Expert Exam 😁
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Oliver Clarke - @OllieClarke  |
Allan Salla - @AllanSantos  |
Charlie Squyers - @CharlieS  |
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Chris McEleavey - @mceleavey 
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Adam Riley - @AdamR_AYX 
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Jonathan Sherman - @Jonathan-Sherman 
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Chris Goodman - @cgoodman3  |
Angelos Pachis - @AngelosPachis  |
Jenny Martin - @JennyMartin  |
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Dylan Gao - @dylan_gao  |
Pat Hottovy - @phottovy  |
Hanna Nykowska - @hanykowska 
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Mauricio Pommier- @pommycho |
Jasper Law - @jasperlch |
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Read and Listen
As one blog series continues, a new one begins... Catch up on the Analytic Apps series to learn all about how to build a UI on top of your workflows, then start in on the Make Your Workflow Visually Impactful series to read why it’s worth the time to make your workflows pretty.
If you’re a fan of xkcd be sure to check out @Hollingsworth's homage in the form of a comic rumination on the most common types of community questions.
The Data Science blog devoted the month of July to featuring two great Inspire 2021 presentations: Computer Vision Within Reach, and Accomplish More with Automated Machine Learning. Find those videos here and here.
On the Alteryx Community, there’s no such thing as a stupid question. So in case someone asks, @Garabujo7 explains that Designer won’t work for long without a license, and the Intelligence Suite won’t work at all if you don’t install it first.
And in case you forgot, we like McLaren and Formula 1.
The MUST listen to podcast of the month features Dan Schneider from the Netflix docuseries, The Pharmacist, who discusses how he's used data to fight the opioid epidemic. And because we ran out of time in May, Alberto Cairo is back to talk more about creating, revising and enjoying thoughtful data vizualizations. Finally, don’t miss out on the most recent Data Science Mixer episode that dives into optimizing data processes with satellite imagery.
Final Thoughts
July is coming to a close, and soon enough the Summer Games will be wrapping up as well. We'll anxiously await the announcement of the top scoring nation, keep our eyes glued to the television, and promptly forget about all of the lesser known sports and events after the fact. We'll allow our lives to return to normal, and all will be good. Then in just a few short months, you'll get to do all of this over again. Instead of your acquaintance talking to you about steeplechase they'll discuss curling, but the experience will be indistinguishable. When that time comes, just remember - you could have been on the Alteryx Community, which would have helped you avoid it. A little food for thought as we wrap up this edition of the blog. Until next month!
