Alteryx with OneDrive?

[bwhitehorne]

Hello, I am pretty new to Alteryx and I'm not sure of the best way to go about what I'm trying to do. I inherited Alteryx from a previous employee that built out all of the workflows that my department uses. When that employee left, I took over running the daily workflows to push out fresh reporting to the team. Before he left, we just created a copy of everything he built on my computer and changed the file paths to make it work. We are the only team in the company that uses Alteryx, so my IT support is limited.

We have 5 separate workflows that are run at least once daily, some are run up to 6 times. Each workflow reads from our Oracle database, a few CSV's, XLSX's, and YXDB's created by other workflows. Each workflow outputs several XLSX's and YXDB's. The XLSX files are then read by Power BI to create visualizations of our data. All users in our department have BI licenses and have access to a few different dashboards that also refresh daily.

This has worked well but as of right now, the workflows read from and write directly to my machine, then the BI dashboards read from my machine as well and are published to our main workspace. This obviously creates an issue if I ever take a day off. We have one other Alteryx user in the department, and previously when I have had time off, he has to physically log into my computer and run the workflows (not safe or ideal). The end goal is to set up a scenario where either Alteryx user can open any workflow from OneDrive, run it, and have that workflow read from and write to OneDrive. Then the BI dashboards would also live in OneDrive and they would read the Alteryx output files that are also stored there.

My initial thought was to just create copies of everything on OneDrive and change the file paths in the workflows to read and write from there. The issue here is that the file path still starts with my user on my machine, so when the other user would try to run it, Alteryx wouldn't be able to find the files. Then I started reading about and downloaded the OneDrive input and output tools. I have not connected these tools to OneDrive yet, but I'm concerned about the file type limitations (AVRO, CSV, or JSON). Would I have to change all my XLSX files to CSV's? Not sure how this will affect Power BI. I also have workflows that read from YXDB files and I wont be able to select that file type in the OneDrive input tool.

My ultimate question is - what is the best way to go about this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

[Aguisande]

Hi @bwhitehorne 

This is just an idea, based on experience, probably there are better ways, but I discovered that using One Drive as "Enterprise repository" is not the best way to go, mostly for Governance, administration and performance issues.

I think that a good way to go is having a Company server share (a shared folder in a company server) where you can drop all your assets (workflows, excel files, yxdb files) and keep them organized and governed.

Also, you'll setup the permissions on that share (if you have AD you can create a group).

So having it, will allow you to use relative paths for all your files (\\<share>\Data1\<my data source>) and all the paths from all the users accessing that will be the same.

Of course, this will need a little IT involvement, but is minimum.

Hop this points you in the right way.