What’s new in Qlik Sense SaaS June 2021

With a range of exciting new additions to the platform over the past month, Mats Severin takes a look at what’s new in Qlik Sense SaaS June 2021…

Hybrid data delivery

Hybrid data delivery is the first Qlik Cloud Data Services offering designed to replicate data in real time from on-premises data sources into Qlik Cloud. The service automatically and continually makes on-premises data ready for consumption in your Qlik cloud tenant without the need for job scheduling or manual scripting.

Additionally, the data is automatically catalogued, transformed into QVD files, and stored in either client-managed or Qlik-managed storage. The QVD files are updated without manual intervention whenever the source data has changed.

The hybrid data delivery capability requires that Qlik Replicate and Qlik Enterprise Manager are installed and configured before using Qlik Cloud Services. The software can be found on the Qlik download site and requires separate licensing.

Notes

Notes is a new collaborative feature allowing users to capture insights, add comments to the data, and share it with others as you analyse the data in the apps. Notes provides users with rich-text narratives along with snapshots of visualisations to create a collaborative experience inside the apps.

Alerting digest

For alerts and system events, users can now choose to receive a daily email digest with notifications packaged together. Users have the option to choose which alerts and types of events are included, what time the digest is delivered, and they can link directly to live analytics for follow-up.

Notifications about data alerts

New data alert notifications can be sent to users for the following events:
• An alert stopped or failed
• The user is added to an alert

Alerting end-to-end tutorial

Users now have access to a tutorial that shows you how to create simple and complex alerts, and how to manage an alert’s life cycle. The tutorial is available on the Qlik Help site here.

Self-service reporting with subscriptions

This new capability allows users to subscribe to charts or sheets to receive a scheduled PDF report distribution to their email. Users can also expand the insights by including a link back into the Qlik Sense app.

Chart monitoring for Qlik Sense Mobile for SaaS
Users can now see the latest version of all monitored visualisations in Qlik Sense Mobile for SaaS. We recently reviewed the mobile app on our YouTube channel:

Adding an image to a point layer map from URL
You can now add an image to a point layer map from a URL. This is in addition to adding images located in the Qlik Cloud media library.

Combo chart improvements
• In a combo chart, you can configure each measure to have its own unique colour setting, either a single colour or colour by expression.
• Users can now add bars on the secondary axis in a combo chart.

Redesigned data sources documentation

Users can now find documentation for data sources supported by Qlik Sense SaaS on the Qlik Help site. This was previously available in the Qlik Connectors documentation.

More connectors available from the Data Manager

The following connectors are now available from the Data Manager:
• AYLIEN News V2
• Google Drive and Spreadsheets
• Google Search Console
• OneDrive Metadata
• Qualtrics
• SugarCRM

Performance improvements for the ODBC connectors

The following performance features are available for all ODBC connectors (except Snowflake):
• Use Bulk reader – This provides a faster way to fetch data.
• Max String Size – This truncates long strings down to a max string size.

Real-world use case example for KMeans

A real-world use case example is available on the Qlik Help site to help users understand the KMeans clustering and Centroid functions. The use case takes users through a real-world business scenario from a raw dataset to calculation of coordinates on a Map chart. The example highlights the value of Qlik Sense KMeans and Centroid functions and can be found here.

Updates to the underscore.js library

The underscore.js library that is exposed through the AMD module in the Qlik Sense client has been updated from version 1.5 to version 1.13. This change fixes a potential security issue with the underscore.js library, but it causes some breaking changes to extensions and mashups that use the library.

Reflection of Qlik Sense SaaS June 2021

Once again, there have been plenty of changes in June 2021. Qlik continues to build on the collaborative experience as well as introducing self-service reporting capabilities. The new features, including the collaborative Notes, email subscriptions to charts and sheets, and data alerting notifications, will enhance the analytics experience without opening the apps. Perhaps the greatest news is the introduction of the Data Services capability in the cloud, including the first offering of the automated hybrid data delivery, taking hybrid deployments one step closer to the cloud.

We recently covered two of these new features – Subscriptions and Notes – in our July webinar. You can watch it back below.