Alteryx Community Ideas

Sometimes, Ideas are posted by users that have solutions or workarounds that meet the user's need.  When others in the Community respond with these suggestions, the ideas usually end up in a status of "Not Planned".

I think it would be really helpful to be able to mark these as "solved".  An example of this is the following post:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Copy-and-Paste-Data-Directly-Into-Canvas/idc-...

Here, the user posted a suggestion, and I as well as @mcarrico were able to provide suggestions that met this need.  I think marking this post as Solved could help other users who have the same thought in the future.

I also think that this might be an opportunity for an additional tag for Community ideas, either "workaround available" or "already implemented".  "Not Planned" doesn't necessarily read as well as it could in cases where a solution exists.

Maybe I missed (if so, please tell me where is it), but a "Remember Me" or "Stay Connected" option would be great, so our sessions doesn't end (I keep this webpage opened almost all day).

Hello,

We don't have any place to post idea about the cloud products. Since it's clearly new products, isn't it relevant to ask your users about what they need?

Best regards,

Simon

Wouldn't it be great to have the option to share a bit more information on your user profile page?

I'm talking about:

- Full name

- Profile

- Location

- Who you work for

- Industry

- Links to social media

- Favourite colour

- First pet's name

- You get the idea.......

The first three are the biggies. It's nice to be able to get a sense of who people are, and to share a bit of who you are with others, and the profile page feels like the perfect place to do this (although it goes without saying that none of this should be mandatory).

Hi,

A great way to promote and share the awesome Alteryx Certification process is to allow Badge and Certification URL  to show up in LinkedIn.  Here is example of IBM certification badges:

https://cognitiveclass.ai/badge-program/

Thanks

Hi all!

This idea stems from my team's need to have Alteryx materials on hand. We have a repository internally built to store all Alteryx related presentations and materials, but it would be great to have it available to Community members if it comes directly from Alteryx.

For example:

1. Presentation slide templates with high production value curated by Alteryx can be shared to Alteryx teams to showcase results, workflows, value engineering, and so much more! It should also cover common topics like how Alteryx and IT Security go along, the requirements to run Alteryx, what is needed to use Alteryx etc. This helps teams get passed the hurdle of actually introducing Alteryx to their companies too. 
2. It will also be good to have slides or PDFs that explain roadmaps, best practices, and a sample doc which all teams can use as a base for their governance or just for references. 
3. Alteryx image assets (as long as it used strictly for Alteryx purposes / demo and not outside commercial purposes) will be great too! Adds flair to what we do in our documentation. https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Discussions/alteryx-tool-icons-to-download... This discussion is pertinent! 
    

Thanks!

Hey @LeahK

you mentioned in your post here (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-News/Alteryx-Community-Top-Contributors-March-201...) just how important it is to mark things as "solution" once they are solved so that people know a good solution to the problem (similar to StackOverflow)

However, I've been trawling through the discussion boards, and there's loads of old stuff out there that has not been marked.

I think that there's two relatively simple things we can do on this:

- Give people quickfilters (like you do on the ideas discussion board to see what's on the roadmap etc) to target problems that are unsolved.  This will allow the solution hounds in the community (see the top 10 list below) the ability to quickly target any spare time to focus on providing solutions.    Note - I'm pretty certain that there is a huge community of people providing solutions, but they are not getting the credit 'cause folks are not marking their original request as "solved"

- Additionally - we need the ability to clean up - I was trawling through the older ones, and there's items out there from 2012 where I'm pretty sure that the requestor is no-longer checking for updates on this thread.   We can do 2 things here:

     - the community can request that people mark these as solved if they are solved (the solution hounds can chase this)

     - we also need the ability to mark a solution if the original poster does not - almost like a community vote like Stack Overflow does - again, this will allow the solution hounds and to assist with cleaning up the backlog, and will also make the data in this community more valuable.   

     - Finally - some things cannot be solved - we need to mark these as "closed but not solved" in some way.    For example - I could easily post something saying "please let me know how to get Alteryx to automatically change variables through the workflow when I change them".    This is on the idea board (and on the roadmap I believe), but not currently solved.   Can we have a way of either marking these as "Closed" or "Closed as new product idea - moved to idea board" and then create an idea-board insert for this?

I think that this would really help in cleaning up the backlog of items on the discussion forum which are years old and still looking like pending discussions!

Thank you 

Sean

Top 10 solution hounds (people with accepted solutions) across the 4 discussion areas as of 09 Apr 2017

( @MarqueeCrew @alex @patrick_digan @Bob_Blackey @pcatterson @Garrett @Kanderson @jlefeaux @JohnJPS @ThizViz @Claje @Abiswal86 @munirsalim @mbarone @msbs48 @AmandaMS @patrick_mcauliffe @ShannonH @rpaugh @bsharbo @tlisti @jdunkerley79 @Evie @DavidVonka @dev_raut @brendafos @toddhowl @oliver_huber just to take the top 10 from the various boards)

Congratulations!  You've ______________ 5 times this week.  Some new gamification ideas to reward continuous involvement in the community.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi all,
I just wanted to raise a potential discussion piece (and my ideas) around best practice and maintenance of the Gallery on the Community.

For context - currently, anyone at all can upload a workflow, consisting of anything at all.

This is fantastic in many senses. Not having to jump through hoops to be able to upload workflows means that there is so much more information being shared, and besides, anyone can post a comment on the discussion boards with an attachment, so it makes sense for them to have the same accessibility for the Gallery.

However, a subsequent issue exists of the same nature. Allowing anyone to create and upload tools creates an environment that can make it hard to find a specific tool you need, or browse for what you like due to potentially low quality or 'example' workflows being uploaded - especially with the Gallery being defaulted to sorting by most recently added. Thankfully, there are a low percentage of the current listings on the Gallery that I would consider spam/low quality, however, I suspect this percentage to increase over time. There are a couple of examples of 'examples' here:

• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/test/ta-p/887539
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Test-Dynamic-Filter-and-Sort/ta-p/886938 
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/SFCU-Test/ta-p/887917 
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Dummy/ta-p/973278
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Axtria/ta-p/973480
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Public-Community-Gallery/Example/ta-p/954363

I have also noticed a couple of weekly challenge answers uploaded to the Community.

From my perspective, there are a few ways of reducing the number of these uploads (and increasing the overall quality of the Gallery):

1. Allow for only 'verified' users to upload to the Gallery. Verified being either only those that apply to be an 'artisan' of the public gallery, or enrol/complete a training module on using the Alteryx Gallery. 
2. Have workflows and Apps go through a verification stage prior to upload, where they are checked by either Alteryx Community Team members or Alteryx Aces. A similar (but not exactly the same) thing has been suggested by @grossal here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Community-Ideas/Gallery-Add-Category-for-Alteryx-ACEs-amp-q...
3. Add an additional option on an Gallery listing to 'flag as spam'
   

   
   I am aware that we have the option to notify moderator, however this seems more suited for 'dangerous' elements of the Community, rather than spam posts.

4. Change the default sorting of tolls to be by likes.

Personally, and without getting too comfortable in volunteering others (I'm more than happy to assist with this process myself), I believe option 2 to be the most suitable. If this option is viable, this would not only remove 'spam' posts, but also tools that are broken or require work before release as an additional benefit. I am aware this would create extra work for the Community/Ace Team, so decided to do a quick scrape and found that the number of new posts each month has been decreasing (on average):

Meaning hopefully the number of uploads currently being faced are achievable within a team to validate. 

I believe this to be something worth considering a year in review of the Gallery, as we are able to consider best practice now for the longer term future of the gallery. An idea such as this would be much harder to implement another year into usage.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on long term maintenance of the Alteryx Gallery. It really is a great resource, but I hope it does not become a needle in a spam haystack situation. 

Cheers,

TheOC

P.S if anyone is interested in the yxdb scrape of all the current Gallery listings, I've attached it below.

So - one of the common things that I do almost every few days - is to pass on an article on the community to someone who I work with.  

Right now - the only way to do this is to share it using the share button (which then goes via e-mail or twitter etc) or otherwise create a personal message, or even worse you can do a reply with "plus person XXX" but this just creates noise on the thread

Could we add 3 features to the community to make this MUCH quicker:

- Share with community user/group of users

- Allow me to create my own group of users like "Admin team" or "Designer users" or "my direct team" which I can forward the message to

- create a notification in the notification section for shared articles

This would make sharing content MUCH faster.

I would like to see a beta testing badge. It would be cool for each version so we can see who is pushing for a better Alteryx future.

I'd love to see the ability to create a private community that would serve as a subset to community.alteryx.com.  Many of us work for large corporations and are unaware of other users within the organization.  We are left to our own devices to attempt to connect and share.  With private communities we could

• enable better networking (who's going to conference?)
• automatically suggest membership to the private community based on email domain or license
• encourage better participation through gamification/badging (competing against peers vs Alteryx consultants and wise aces)
• share knowledge
• identify who the best participants were within our organization (as a way to identify talent)
• reveal opportunity gaps and leverage positive peer pressure (if Joe's department is now certified why isn't mine?)

I am meeting a lot of awesome people at #Inspire17!! ...but when I went to try and find some of them on the Community, I realize there is no easy way to do this. How cool would it be for there to be a User or People section on the Community where you could find people by querying their public stats (or even private stats if the user checks something saying to make those stats public)?! This feature could help tremendously with networking! Here's some situations where something like this would help:

"I remember this guy worked for x-company, if only I could see their name, I would know who it is"

"I want to connect with other Alteryx users near me"

"I want to reach out to this presenter from Inspire17, but I forgot what their Community Username was"

Hi @LeahK,

On our profile pic (top right) there is a very simple marker that shows if you have new messages or notifications.

Can we implement something similar for the other areas on the left hand panel?

- if there are new items in the discussions, then put a green circle with a number in indicating the count

- Same for Knowledge

- same for training; blogs; events etc.

This would be MASSIVELY helpful because that would allow everyone to see on a simple scan if there's new content out there without having to trawl into each section one by one to find new stuff.

NOTE: if we wanted to really make this uber-cool, for the discussion areas, users would be able to say "only count unsolved (or only new unsolved) discussion treads in my notification counter".   That way, people like the top solution hounds (listed below) could be in and solving problems in seconds.

Top solution authors copied: (based on https://community.alteryx.com/t5/solutions/acceptedsolutionsleaderboardpage/node-display-id/board%3A...)

@MarqueeCrew @jdunkerley79  @JohnJPS @michael_treadwell @patrick_digan @pcatterson @Joe_Mako @DataBlender @s_pichaipillai @Federica_FF @chris_love @tom_montpool @jack_morgan @kane_glendenning @Bob_Blackey @alex @danielbrun2 @DultonM @dataMack @Kanderson

Hi there

(cc @AshleyK ; @JoshH ; @BenG ; @LDuane ; @JulieH )

Looking at the ideas board for the Alteryx Product Ideas - it's clear that these ideas are not being processed by the product teams.   76% of all the ideas logged are still in "New" state, with 1033 unique ideas out there which have not yet been moved into a state which would indicate any sort of consideration.

Is there anything that we as a community can do to help?

Note: Many of these ideas point to similar issues, so with some curation this number can be brought down significantly.

Thank you

Sean

It would be wonderful to have a rich mobile version of the community.

Lithium has an experimental (beta) version out there, and if Alteryx can adopt this we can use the power of the alteryx community to test this and make this bullet proof.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lithium.lithosphere

Hopefully this lithium mobile app can be used on any lithium-powered site without re-engineering?

What do you think about an area in the community for people to look for talent or offer their talent. If we had that, I can tell you right now it would be my first stop before any job search or recruiting sites.

@LeahK,

How about having a page dedicated to the Grand Prix?  It could include a virtual trophy and bios of the winners (even the participants).  It might also be interesting to have links to the actual problems that they had to solve and potentially even have the data too for download.  Videos of the winning experiences would be a bonus.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi all,

Reading through the product ideas raised by the community - it strikes me that there are significant clusters.   Two jump out - improvements to date/time handling & parsing, and caching.

This is not a suggestion about either of these topics, but a question about how we look at and structure these ideas.   Let's take the date-time ones (full list is below) as a worked example:

- there are 23 distinct ideas (or 22 if you exclude the one about generating random dates) which relate to the treatment (mainly parsing; formatting or constructing) of dates & times

- None of these individually has enough votes to get them onto the "hot ideas" list - however when you look in aggregate across them, the theme of "standardizing and enriching date-time processing" is probably one of the hottest topics at the moment.

Two suggestions:

Tagging: If we are able to spot these patterns - and then create a tag that is related to this (in this case "DateTime handling") - the product team would probably be able to do some pretty interesting analytics.

Grouping: In order to allow people to spot these BEFORE they log the next idea which is trying to achieve the same thing - is it worth the community creating a grouped-up idea which then becomes persistent if there is a clear trend; and we can link out to these ideas?   For example an idea saying "standardize & Enrich treatment of date time", which then becomes a sticky item at the top of the forum so that folks don't have to search for pages to see if their idea is a duplicate.

NOTE: this second one (grouping) will also save time for the product team because they won't have to spend as much time flagging duplicates...

Hope this makes sense - as always, happy to help in thinking about potential solutions.

Note: the 23 ideas related to date-time treatment are captured below (as a worked example), and the authors of these ideas have been tagged out of courtesy

@DultonM @braxtone @Philip @AshokBhatt @CSchrader @dawid_nawrot @jdunkerley79 @Joe_Lipski @ChadB @nicholas_carstens @GGuenther @AndrewW @RachelW