Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
We’re excited to announce our latest release, Sophisticated Solving in 2020.4, going live during what has been a busy fourth quarter and year for our Product & Engineering teams here at Alteryx! We’ve completed many key initiatives and refined our products by adding exciting new enhancements that will continue to have you feeling unstoppable with Alteryx.
Read on to discover how your solving will become more sophisticated with our latest release while bringing together your people, processes, and data through our Analytic Process Automation Platform to pave the way for digital transformation in your organization.
Alter Your Team’s Collaboration with Analytics Hub
Analytics Hub launched around our 2020.2 release, and since then, we have been listening closely to customer feedback and adding key functionality that will elevate your Hub experience.
With our latest release, you can now gain better visibility into the entire platform job queue and assign priority to jobs or schedules in the queue so that you can rest assured that the results from your workflow run will be available in time for your meeting the next morning.
We’ve added the capability for you to sync Windows Active Directory Groups with Hub – this seamless integration will make managing that ever-changing list of users a dream come true in Hub.
There are several enhancements around worker nodes and licensing to look forward to in 2020.4. We’ve worked hard to improve the licensing and setup experience so that you can now activate license keys simultaneously and manage worker license keys from Hub.
Easily enable your Data Package licenses, in order to Run and share workflows on Hub that use location and business insights to help produce meaningful business outcomes.
Lastly, we’re thrilled to offer the ability to assign a tag to a particular job or schedule so that it can be run on a specific worker node. This provides enhanced governance so that your workflows run where you want them to — on-prem or in the cloud, you pick — and the insights keep flowing.
Interested in learning more about what we’ve updated in Hub since 2020.2? Read this blog post to find out!
You’ll be Unstoppable with These New Additions to Server
Are you an Alteryx customer who uses Server to automate mundane tasks? You’ll be glad to know that we’ve implemented these next couple of features that will save time and help you become more efficient than ever. Assign the use of RunAs credentials to custom user groups with Server to grant a group RunAs permissions to run workflows as if they were under a specific user account. If you’re unfamiliar with our RunAs capabilities, check out our help documentation!
In 2020.3, we released a feature for admins to create custom Server-managed user groups from the admin view, independently of Active Directory. Now, in 2020.4, you’ll also be able to grant custom user groups specific permissions to a Collection. Now, you can create as many custom groups of Server users as needed and assign each group to the same Collection with each of them having varying permissions to the assets in the Collection. This makes managing groups of assets a streamlined experience and gives members of your organization access to only what they need.
Updates to Designer You Will Dig
We’ve got some changes to Designer we think you’re gonna like. In 2020.4, we’ve taken our existing 200+ sample datasets, and made them readily available in the Help menu in Designer to help you kickstart your solving. Kiss the days goodbye of having to search endlessly online for sample data. Whether you are brand new to Alteryx or trying to understand how to begin constructing a workflow, peruse our sample data to begin your journey.
Calling all Alteryx global users! We have improved your experience manipulating numeric values in your workflow as well as how you see numbers displayed in Designer (for example, workflow run time). With International Numeric Separator support, we can now easily recognize all kinds of delimiters that separate out your numbers, which will save you from extra data prep steps upstream in your workflow. In addition, customize the delimiters within numbers that are displayed to you anywhere in Alteryx Designer under User Settings by editing the Thousand Separator fields.
Our new AMP (Alteryx Multithreaded Processing) Engine is all the rage, and if you’ve tried it out, you’d know why. Integrated into versions 2020.2 and later of Designer, AMP is designed to work with larger volumes of data at higher velocity and typically executes workflows more quickly, with efficient usage of machine resources. In 2020.4, two new tools (Download and Summarize) have been converted to leverage the AMP engine.
Azure Data Lake Connector 2.0 Is Finally Here with Gen2 Storage and Azure Government Cloud Connectivity!
We are excited to release version 2.0 of the Azure Data Lake Connector, found on Alteryx Public Gallery. This includes the option to connect to the
Azure Government Cloud. The Azure Government cloud provides a dedicated instance of Azure for US federal, state, and local governments and is built to provide world-class protection and security. Additionally, the Azure Data Lake Connector provides connectivity to any customized Azure Data Lake endpoints including China Cloud.
This updated connector will accommodate those who require a higher level of security in the cloud and enable more flexibility in supporting hybrid, remote, and on-premise connectivity.
Another exciting upgrade with this Data Connector is that it includes Gen2 storage type access, optimized for leading cloud analytic engines.
Python Upgrade
In 2020.4, we’ve upgraded the Python version embedded in Alteryx from Python 3.6.8 to Python 3.8.5. This valuable update captures Python’s latest security enhancements and fixes. As this is a substantial version change, we’ve laid out a path to make your upgrade as smooth and easy as possible. If you’re a custom Python tool user, learn how this upgrade could impact you. If you‘re a Python tool developer, here’s how to validate the tools you’ve built for other users. Need help? We’re here for you!
Upgrade to 2020.4 Today!
2020 has been a year full of perseverance, resiliency, and innovation despite remote work, the pandemic, and overcoming challenges we’ve all had to face. Thank you for reading about what we’ve been up to in 2020.4 and don’t forget to upgrade to our latest release or get started with Alteryx through a free Designer trial! We’re looking forward to seeing Alteryx continue to help many more users and organizations worldwide with the products and features we engineer just for you in 2021.
To read more about new additions mentioned in this blog and more, head over to our Technical Documentation. We 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 to Get a Sneak Peek at What’s Next?
If you are 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.
