Removing Studios from the Gallery: your opinion/concerns

[fmvizcaino]

Hello everyone,

We've had a session yesterday talking about the studios removal and everything going to the collections in the Alteryx gallery. Also, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of standard configurations are going to be controlled directly by user groups and it will have a personal space for each user to use.

For me, the main concern are related to migration of bigger server structures with a lot of studios and collections and also the admin control of all the personal space .

What is your opinion? Do you see any negative sides to it? I think this is an optimal opportunity to talk about it and to give Alteryx dev team our opinion as well.

[JohnPelletier]

Thanks for posing this question @fmvizcaino ! I think about this topic every day, since I'm the PM for Server. Any feedback to make sure we have all the bases covered would be appreciated. We really want this to be a seamless transition to a better management model for you.

With regard to large installations, is your concern about how to automate the migration of those studio users into groups and those assets into a collection? We plan to offer some management API endpoints, along with some sample scripts, to help with automating this effort. 

Or is there a different concern around those larger structures?

You also mention the admin control of the personal space...what are your concerns there?

[JohnPelletier]

I'd love to hear from other customers who are concerned with the new management model as well...let me also mention that I presented a session on this topic if you're interested. 

New Model for Users and Asset Management in Server: Why, What, How, and When

[fmvizcaino]

Hi @JohnPelletier ,

That's so great that you are here! This was exactly what I was aiming for. Now we only need customers opinions as well. 😁

Since all is done with an API, I'm sure there will be a lot of insecurities in our customers related to the migration success.

The concern about migration is mainly related to the migration homologation. Here in Brazil, it is pretty common for companies to have a single-node production server with no test server, so it end up being a licensing concern, will Alteryx provide a trial license to help with the homologation process?

About the personal space, we have one customer that doesn't want their artisans to have a private studio for each one to use, so they have inserted all of them in a single studio and control all of them with a customized usage report in QlikSense. The suggestion here is to have a global button to eliminate personal spaces in the gallery.

Best,

Fernando Vizcaino

[JohnPelletier]

@fmvizcaino To be honest, I had to look that word up, since I'd never heard it before (homologation). Essentially, you need to prove & certify that the conversion from private studio to user group was done correctly, am I right? I think it should be possible with the API that's coming soon...you can generate a report of which users are in the Private Studio and then another of the users that are in the resulting User Group, and compare the list. Will that work?

>>About the personal space, we have one customer that doesn't want their artisans to have a private studio for each one to use, so they have inserted all of them in a single studio and control all of them with a customized usage report in QlikSense. The suggestion here is to have a global button to eliminate personal spaces in the gallery.

Do they want to do this because they're afraid that too many workflows will remain un-shared? Is this a house-cleaning requirement, where your customers don't want workflows to be orphaned when a user stops using Server? What kind of usage are they trying to control? Sorry for so many questions, but this is challenging to understand...and I love a challenge.

And thanks for my Word of the Day: Homologate!

[fmvizcaino]

Hi @JohnPelletier ,

Homologation question:

I think that would work, my only concern is related to those customers that needs to validate everything since it is a structure change. But if the API generates a quick report showing what was and what has become, we shouldn't have any problem.

Personal space question:

Yes! They don't want users to use the personal space as a production personal space. All the personal workflows will remain in their machine. The gallery will be IT controlled and they only want workflows aproved by them. I think a configuration button to globally remove the personal space would be enough, but I know this is a bit specific.

Here in Brazil it is a pretty common word and the literal translation is homologation, but I think the proper word is QA.

It would be great for you to present that in a session for the ACEs and get all their feedbacks. In my opinion, it would help you see the customer and partners side as well! What do you think @LeahK and @JohnPelletier ??

Best,

Fernando Vizcaino

[FláviaB]

@fmvizcaino that could be a good idea! What about you bring this question to the ACE private lounge for more visibility so everyone could share their insights? 😉

[qw199505]

I fear this discussion may be too late but here are my two cents...

The server has many issues from my perspective but high on the list is that conceptually asset ownership is personal.  Flows & Schedules for example belong initially to who created/added them to the Gallery but also to the studio, be it personal or a "team" studio.  Most orgs create Team Studios for sharing and management.  When someone changes teams, or leaves the company, their schedules in the previous studio are broken.  

This is a basic problem for an enterprise because the flows and schedules are company assets and not personal assets.  

Also people change teams and companies regularly and for continuity a schedule running a critical job regularly stops running and we here about it because end users complain about the system not working.  Not a good thing and especially not good if they are high ranking in the org.  

Sometimes the fix is a simple re-enabling of a schedule but since 2020.4.6 we see problems doing this and changing owners and we still have the original issue of it breaking in the first place.

We are not a large Alteryx implementation by some standards, a couple hundred developers and 4 server infrastructure. But we have a team of 2 managing this globally with over 900 personal "Private Subscriptions", those created when a user is created, 60 Team Studios/subscriptions, and around 7k workflows in Mongo with between 1500 and 3000 jobs running each day on the servers.

So now if we discontinue Studios all the jobs and schedules currently in studios have to be assigned/migrated to one of the personal studios, then a collection created to essentially replicate the team studio that is going away.  Seems a shell game requiring a lot of change work for us that nets us nothing better.  I don't know your code so I can't say there is not future value to eliminating studios form the code making it easier to maintain or position you for some new direction but it seems to net us zero.

Collections are still "owned" by one individual.  Yes you can make others admins and a Curator can intervene when someone leaves the company and did not have other admins assigned.  But that is not ideal since no one in that collection likely tracks personnel changes and impacts so again we get a panic call or complaint and a system wide curator (admin) probably has no idea of what to enable etc.until they do some leg work tracking down what the deal is and who should replace the person who left...etc.

I like Team Studios based on what we have today but can live with Collections...but I don't like change that has potential to disrupt operations with no perceived value for my organization.  Until Alteryx adopts an enterprise perspective and considers the issues system wide administration needs to work in their server design I foresee issues. 

You have roles and the Curator is basically the admin but it is system wide.  Whether studios or collections there should be a Curator role for the team (studio or collection) who can administer needs at that level and a system wide Admin.

So I guess my issue with discontinuing Studios is that we aren't really getting rid of them since there will always be the "personal" studios and essentially everything that is in a team studio (one basket) gets split out to multiple smaller baskets.  a manager, team lead, director of a team now has to trust everything is in the collection.  someone building a flow but goes on vacation for 2 weeks before publishing to the collection has left managers with a challenge to track down and get into someone else's hands to finish.

This problem is addressed in a team studio since you can only be in one studio at a time so anything you save to gallery goes to that "shared" space.

So with collections will alteryx provide new access controls/roles where a manager/team lead can access a developers personal studio?  will there be a UI layer for managers to mange/see what is out there for flows and such in personal studios as well as collections each person may own and or be shared to?  From our perspective there is NOTHING in a personal studio/collection that belongs to the user, it belongs to the company, and thus the manager.

Will there be a script or report we can run to preview what will or should be done?

Will there be a script to do the migration?  or just an API we will need to sort out on our own?

Will the API properly handle discrepencies?  I did analysis on our Mongo due to issues since our last upgrade and found appinfo entries without Apps and vice versa, Schedules with no App and other discrepancies we are now sifting through.  I have concerns migration actions may create problems but also see the opportunity to build it so it is a tool to identify and fix problems that seem inevitable in this system. 

Sorry for writing a book but this topic hit a sore spot.

[JohnPelletier]

@qw199505 Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry you've been frustrated with our legacy implementation, and my hope is that our plans for the future will make things better. You are right that there are more standard ways of doing things, but you also rightly express concern around disruptions and net zero processes. My goal as the Product Manager is to move as close to the standard way of doing things and create some new value for you while also trying to minimize the trouble I cause you. I'm definitely aiming for that, and our executive team has recently increased funding for me to accomplish that more quickly.

There are already a lot of roadmap plans to help make the ownership model easier to manage. Even so, I'd be happy to walk you through the roadmap and to hear your ideas. Please reach out to the Alteryx account team to schedule some time if you're interested. 

[JohnPelletier]

@qw199505  One more clarification:

>>So now if we discontinue Studios all the jobs and schedules currently in studios have to be assigned/migrated to one of the personal studios,

>>then a collection created to essentially replicate the team studio that is going away.  

>>Will there be a script to do the migration?  or just an API we will need to sort out on our own?

Before we discontinue Studios, we'll offer a new set of API endpoints and most likely some sample script code for using it to automate this process, and you can shape it to your own business needs. On top of that, we plan to also have an auto-migration routine in the post-Studios versions that will do this for you if you haven't yet done it.

>>Will the API properly handle discrepencies?  I did analysis on our Mongo due to issues since our last upgrade and found appinfo entries without Apps and vice versa, Schedules with no App and other discrepancies we are now sifting through. 

We have made some great strides for Server upgrade quality in the latest build and are now planning to create some additional integrity checks on the database to greatly improve the upgrade process in the near future.