How often have you watched home renovation shows on HGTV over the past year? Don't lie, it's probably a lot (it definitely is for me at least) and there's nothing wrong with that! There's something so satisfying about watching a house transform into an entirely new version of itself to breathe new life into the family experience there. All of the old bones are still there, it's just freshened up and modernized.
In case you didn't notice, the community had a little work done over the past few days as well! There's always a lot of development and work going on behind the scenes in our community factory, but a lot of times you don't even see the results. Why? Because they're supposed to be improving things for you without making a big deal. However, this time we want to make a little big bigger deal of it, because we have an absolutely amazing, fully renovated new community experience for you! Read on for more details in your March Highlights and Release Notes!
As you might have noticed, the community got a fresh coat of paint!For this redesign, we focused on streamlining the user experience, so our primary focus was the navigation, home page and categories.Though many other areas including the user page and user pop up navigation received updates as well. We felt that it was time to move things into the modern era since they could have been considered a bit... dated.
With the navigation update,a lot of ourboards have moved around, but all the same amazing content is still present. Participate now is a central hub for all methods of engaging on the Community, and includes our Discussions, Ideas and Community Hub categories. Our Learn category is now the primary place for users to read, learn and grow their Alteryx skills with our Blogs, Podcasts and Academy areas. All our support resourceshave been consolidatedwithin our Support category, which now houses our Knowledge Base and links to our release notes and help documentation. User can now get involved with our many user groups and chat about current and future events with our Groups & Events category that holds our User Groups, Inspire Buzzand Women of Analytics boards.
However, we get the first few times moving around on our new navigation might be confusing, so we included a cheat sheet of where all our boards went.
Participate
Learn
Support
Groups & Events
Use Cases
-Community Hub
-Discussions
-Ideas
-Alteryx For Good
-Alteryx Advocacy
-Beta Program
-ACE Program
-Academy
-Blogs
-Podcast
-Knowledge
-Release Notes
-Downloads & Licenses
-Virtual Solution Center
-Help Documentation
-Support
-User Groups
-Inspire Buzz
-Women of Analytics
-Use Cases
-Excellence Awards
Our international communities have also been touched up with the same navigation experience and update, so boards in those communities will now match up in location with the main navigation.
We're also excited to announce that our Recommendation Engine has moved out of beta! Users should start seeing the engine appear just under the Featured home page content over the next few days. Be sure to let us know what you think in General Discussions, both the good and the bad so we can continue to perfect user recommendations!
As our development team looks forward to April and all the great updates, werecognized that we have another update coming that we want users to be aware of. In late April we will be completing another no access maintenance period for our SSO update. As we get closer, we will be letting users know the exact date of this maintenancevia the announcements.
OK, that was a lot of info to take in, but it's all really important stuff for you to know as a member of the Alteryx Community, especially with such big changes. If you're still reeling, head over to our Getting Started on Community article for a full rundown of the new layout.
Well we've got some other big news coming up soon as well, first of which is Virtual Global Inspire! With in-person events still a little difficult to pull off, Alteryx is bringing you a conference you can attend from home. You can read all about the event on the communityhere in Inspire Buzz, and registrations are open now. Sign up to attend the three day event for training experiences, breakout sessions, and some truly stellar keynotes! There will also be a lot of content being brought to you by our ACEs, which you definitely won't want to miss.
The Alteryx Excellence Awards have also extended their deadline. You've got until the end of the day tomorrow (April 2) to make your submission, so get in there for a chance to get some incredible recognition. The Alteryx Excellence Awards give recognition for customers and partners that truly go above and beyond with Alteryx. Think you could make the cut? Go here to nominate yourself, but make it quick, you don't want to miss your chance.
In another bit of global news for the community, our French Community has laucnhed a new Data Podcast! Now, as you can imagine, putting together a podcast is no easy feat (some of you likely know this from experience). Kudos to all of the work that went into this; I for one can't wait to see more of them in the future! If you speak French (or even if you don't - YouTube has auto-translate) go check out Episode 1 focusing on Alteryx and SAP!
And finally, we wrapped up our Reasons to Automate series that multiple people form Alteryx collaborated on! There's always something to be gained from automation, and these folks share some of the reasons they benefit from using Alteryx to streamline their work lives. You can check out the original blog with links to all 8 of the posts and take a look if you haven't had the chance. Who knows, they might be just the spark you need to get going on your own automation journey! Now on to the next section!
Have you added “smart house” features to your home? Our March blog posts offered lots of ways to renovate your workflows to make them even smarter. Check out the AMP Engine’s potential for speeding up your work, or use Alexa to run your workflows at your command. And find out more about working with Excel files, RegEx, and data dictionaries to maximize efficiency and accuracy.
We showcased the equivalent of a tool library for DIY data science, too. Learn all about how you can freely use our open-source Python packages, including Featuretools and EvalML, plus a cool combination of EvalML and Woodwork together. Need a data-science home inspection or appraisal? Use the Data Health Tool to check your data; learn about feature scaling methods to tidy it up; and appraise your regression models with the right metric.
As you’re renovating your workflows with tips from our March blogs, tune in to the recent Alter Everything and Data Science Mixer podcast episodes to keep the inspiration going. This month, we started a “listening party” thread to celebrate the 5 women featured in episodes. All of themare passionate about creatively challenging themselves,and work to make the human experience in data science as efficient and fun as possible!
Final Thoughts
And with that, it is time to again say goodbye to another monthly edition of the Highlights and Release Notes. As you leave, take a moment to absorb the beautiful new face of our community. We've brought it from something that simply functioned to something that possesses some beauty. Now go forth, watch some renovation shows on HGTV, and think about how sprucing things up sometimes transforms them entirely.
Will runs community engagement programs for the Alteryx Community and wants to ensure that all members get the resources, activity, and information they need. He is always open to hear feedback and ideas and loves connecting with everyone in the community to strengthen relationships and build strong ties.
Will runs community engagement programs for the Alteryx Community and wants to ensure that all members get the resources, activity, and information they need. He is always open to hear feedback and ideas and loves connecting with everyone in the community to strengthen relationships and build strong ties.
Its really stylish now. Just one small thing, can the notification one level upfront next to the User Profile Icon. Still like to see how many are there right away when I logged in.
As a bit fan of HGTV -- I feel a very special connection to this blog.
@atcodedog05 -- we hope the new neighborhood is still as friendly as ever 😍
@Qiu -- We have plans to up-level the notifications/messages back to the avatar. Turns out that was a bug that we were unable to fix before the release, but it will be back to normal in no time 😉
