2021.4 - Scaling Better for the Enterprise

[sureshvittal]

Achieve greater scale across your enterprise with our latest release — 2021.4

Our Product & Engineering teams have been hard at work to deliver tools and capabilities that are going to help you achieve greater scale with data and analytics across the enterprise. 

With this release, we’re enhancing how you connect to data with new data connectors, and how you securely share those connections with our new Data Connection Manager (DCM). Server users will notice a more streamlined interface and will be able to configure users, workflows, schedules, collections, connections and credentials all directly in our Admin API V3. Finally, our advanced Designer users and developers have eagerly been awaiting an update to our software development kit and we’ve delivered with Platform SDK v2. 

Read on to learn about how these features (and more) are enabling organizations to scale their analytics automation. 

Securely share data connections and collaborate

With DCM, Designer users will be able to create data connections (connections refer to the linkage between credentials and data sources) and sync that information up to Server. This allows users to share their data connections with peer users and user groups running workflows on Server. 

Data Connection Manager makes storing credential information easy.  
 

Manage teams and scale usage

Alteryx Server Admins can now configure users, workflows, schedules, collections, connections, and credentials using Admin API v3. This opens the door for API automation and RPA integration as well as allowing users to better support their own custom management portals. 
 

Admin API v3 also comes with a simplified interface. 

Create new tools and capabilities 

Alteryx Platform SDK provides our developer and partner community the tools they need to customize their Alteryx experience by building custom tools and plugins and share those with teams or on Gallery. The new version brings critical new capabilities and greatly improves performance:  

• Integration with DCM, allowing secure sharing of credential information  
• Schedule workflows that include SDK connectors on Alteryx Server
• Simplified interface will increase Developer time-to-value by ~30%  
• Improved plugin performance by up to 99%
• Test plugins without needing Designer  
• Custom plugins developed with 2.0 will be compatible with Designer 21.4+ 

Visit our Platform SDK QuickStart Guide to learn more! 
 

Anytime, anywhere access  

With 21.4, Desktop Designer users will be able to authenticate into Designer Cloud, open a workflow, and save that workflow from Desktop to Cloud. Users will also be able to open a Cloud workflow and transition to Designer Desktop. This is a key enabler for cross-functionality between Designer Desktop and our new Cloud offering. 
 

Bring Named Entity Recognition and analytics into your workflow 

The Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a Text Mining tool that extracts and categorizes entities from bodies of text. It can identify named entities, including multi-word entities, such as people, organizations, locations, and enhances automation of document image reading. For example, customers are using NER to group expenses by event name or location name, and then creating reports to fully understand cost of ownership.  

Pull Named Entity Recognition into an Alteryx workflow and it will automatically detect entities in text.  

Upgrade to 2021.4 today 

There are many more enhancements, features, and ways to scale better across the enterprise with our latest release. To read more about new additions mentioned in this blog, head over to Technical Documentation. We also love hearing your thoughts and suggestions! Let us know what you think about this release or share your ideas on our Community Discussion Forums. 

Want a sneak peek at what’s next? 

If you’re a current customer, find out more about what new features we’re working on behind the scenes through our Public Preview Beta Program. You can now test all features in one Designer build and provide feedback directly to our Product Team. 

[levell_x_dunn]

I like the technical side of 2021.4 but my concern is that it came at the cost of alienating our nontechnical users and moves Alteryx away from being a Data artisan.

The home page is currently focused on helping technical users with the ability to interact and see what each app is doing and how to use it via the banner.

Our ratio on the Server/Gallery is 20:1 for Users vs Devolopers.

With changing the home page away from Public but starting with My file, most users won't know what this is or have anything there. Steering them away from adoption and ease of use.

The second thing is that the banners are gone and as well, which turns this from a homepage to a list of information that isn't what they primary need

This is going to be difficult to move forward with this release.

[levell_x_dunn]

The second step backward was taking the existing display of the Meta info field from being visible and useful for other developers and users to see how to use a tool and who to contact if there are any questions

As you can see, it's now just one big long text without any spaces and not designed for actual consumption. It also strips away the Author field, which is key for us as the person publishing the workflow isn't always the one you designed or developed it, and not being able to show those fields like before ignores the complexity of a workflow

[Franz]

This version appears to bear remnants of what used be called the 'AAH'; Which seemed like a nice product but it just overwhelmed Alteryx and they dropped it, partly because of the acquisitions which will now employ most of the productive resources in endless meetings and discussions on future tooling...

[JohnPelletier]

@levell_x_dunn Thanks for your feedback. While we remake the entire Server UI, some functionality will come in waves. We understand your concerns and hope to give you a better experience later in the year.

[mkosmicki1]

Has the server bug been fixed? We were unable to connect to our server with 2021.4 and had to reinstall 2021.3.

[cdeitschel1]

Was that Excel issue that Alteryx sent out on February 18 addressed in this release?  

[JohnPelletier]

Yes, the Excel issue was fixed in 21.4.2 for Designer and Server, though it's listed in Designer release notes where it was originally logged.

https://help.alteryx.com/release-notes/designer/designer-20214-release-notes

[levell_x_dunn]

@JohnPelletier ,

Thank you Johh for replying back. I see 21.4.2 has been released and fixed the excel and chained app has been addressed. 
The format, Banner, and text preview are still items that need to be fixed. I'll wait and see what version 2022.1 brings to the table. For now, KP will have to skip this version and wait for a more sustainable product.

It also looks like the new API 3 links aren't configured right and point to localhost causing them to fail.