MicroStrategy CTO Newsletter Fall 2022
MicroStrategy 11.3.7 with Migrations in Workstation
Dear MicroStrategy Customer,
With data that is constantly compounding, any organization strives to extend analytics impact in this digitized world. And it’s time to rethink how we equip users with data. It’s not simply data accessibility that we should focus on, it’s insight accessibility. For example, how easy is it for an end user at your organization to synthesize data and map that to action?
Think about it. Do users have to go through multiple reports? Scroll through multiple pages of Excel? Do they have current access to the correct systems? If you don’t know the answers to these questions — that’s fine, we get it. Bottom line: Users shouldn’t have to go searching for insights — insights should be delivered right to them.
Data is your greatest differentiator, and it should be front and center — easy for users to find.
To increase analytics adoption, organizations must build immersive, interactive experiences that speak to the users. The data experience should be simple, efficient, and integrated into workflows that users already trust. MicroStrategy’s no-code application development tool disrupts the traditional thinking that development work has high costs and requires highly skilled coders. New application editors enable industry giants and small businesses alike to design and deploy applications fast, transforming any developer into a tech trailblazer.
And these applications can be for any user across any industry. MicroStrategy provides the platform to build solutions based on specific use cases. This quarter, alongside new product features, we’re rolling out an entirely new Solutions Marketplace to showcase the innovative, tailored analytics solutions that our teams have been working on behind the scenes. These dossier applications were designed based on extensive industry research and serve as templates for organizations to seamlessly kick off their own application development.
The revamped Solutions page will go LIVE this October. Providing all details on how these applications leverage the product synergy of free-form layout and flexible navigation, an embedded HyperIntelligence layer, and automatic alerts based on specific KPIs. Yeah, you read that right: automatic alerts that do, in fact, deliver insights to the users.
There’s a lot of excitement here at MicroStrategy as we move into Q4 — powerful content, impactful consulting engagements with some of the most successful companies, and impressive new product features designed to enrich the analytics experience for users worldwide.
With that, we’re proud to announce that MicroStrategy 11.3.7 is now available on MicroStrategy Cloud, as well as for download to on-prem environments.
Let’s get into some of the top feature highlights of September:
Dossiers
We continue to add to and enhance the overall authoring experience to elevate the quality of applications that can be built. This quarter, we placed focus on panel stacks:
- Enable targeting from the visualizations or content within a panel stack. Previously, target and control functionalities were limited to within a single panel stack. Authors can now use the content of a Panel Stack to target any other in-canvas elements and provide a more seamless analytics experience for end users.
Workstation and Administration
- Seamlessly move objects between environments with migration packages. Administrators can search or browse objects to be migrated. Continue to configure, create, and validate these migrations packages in one place. Note that migration packages can be reused to migrate the same object to additional environments or reversed if a migration is not as expected — providing flexibility for administrators.
- Enterprise Security allows the management of authentication configurations (IAM) to be reused across data gateways and data sources.
- View new certification symbols that indicate certified content within both the Content Groups and Application editors for a more consistent Workstation experience.
- Preview Feature: Reports are now available in MicroStrategy Workstation. Users can seamlessly interact with reports or edit reports with respective authoring permissions. The all-new experience maintains all the top Reports features for smooth transition: View Filters, SQL View, Page-By, and the Advanced Properties panel.
- Preview Feature: The Free-Form SQL Report Editor is now available to preview. This enables users to write specific queries to create reports.
Applications
In today’s world of MicroStrategy Applications, we’re referring to the no-code, application editor in Workstation that allows you to personalize the MicroStrategy experience. If you missed the debut at World 2022, this editor enables administrators to assign either an entire Library portal or individual dossier as an entire application experience. These applications can be viewed across web, desktop, and mobile — all leveraging the underlying MicroStrategy Library framework. Since the initial release, we’ve added features that enhance white-labeling and content options for these applications:
- Users can leverage undo and redo actions when viewing dossiers in Library Mobile for Android. Users can undo page switching, drilling, sorting, as well as other in-canvas manipulations for an enhanced experience in the mobile application.
- Improved color contrast across mobile applications for a more accessible blue and overall color palette. These changes apply to mobile applications only.
- Preview Feature: In the previous release, we released the preview feature that allows administrators to configure the logo of the application itself. This September, we are allowing administrators to configure the logo, links, and content of the notification email when sharing content with others. This provides a more personalized app experience — without end users even knowing that MicroStrategy is powering it all.
- Preview Feature: Reports are now available in MicroStrategy Library. Users can seamlessly interact with reports or edit reports with respective authoring permissions. The all-new experience maintains all the top Reports features for smooth transition: View Filters, SQL View, Page-By, and the Advanced Properties panel.
Embedded Analytics
Remember how we said that the data experience should be simple? And that the data experience should be integrated into workflows that users trust? That’s where the combination of data visualizations and embedding is the ultimate power play — these two are better together and extend analytics beyond the initial impact.
To enable more streamlined and data-infused decision-making, embedding rich analytics content into existing products or applications is key. These embedded experiences can be customized for internal users, customers, or even partners.
With MicroStrategy’s Embedding SDK, integrate pages of analytics or specific KPIs to make your products more impactful, and even more profitable, and display trusted data to drive overall user engagement. Embedding options can range from multiple charts visually representing success metrics for the business’ website to an entire sales report in an internal application:
- With this release, the Embedding SDK now enables organizations to embed components of the MicroStrategy Library home page. Embed the entire content portal into existing products or applications or define individual elements of the Library such as Content Groups or the ability to manage Subscriptions.
Data Gateways
- Support of two new data gateways. Create connections and run analytics with optimized SQL against Starburst or the upcoming Google AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. These two new gateways will be important when leveraging cloud-powered analytics.
- Introducing additional support of DSN-less data source creation for the following gateways: Spanner, AlloyDB, IBM Netezza, IBM NPS, Yellowbrick, and Denodo.
- In this release, we delivered push down for Case and CaseV functions for SingleStore, Vertica, and MongoDB.
- From Workstation, users can now easily edit data sources that were created during import. This provides more efficient processes.
In case you missed it, watch the exclusive recap of September’s MicroStrategy Connect. The Product team reviewed all of the new features in more depth, including the initial reveal of the Insights feature now available in limited environments.
To review the full list of features from this release, please visit the What’s New section of the MicroStrategy Readme. And to learn more about the continued progress towards the official launch of MicroStrategy Cloud for Government, visit our main Government page. MicroStrategy has been sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services for FedRAMP authorization — as one of the most prominent federal agencies overseeing multiple different divisions, including the CDC and FDA, we’re excited for this collaboration.
From the MicroStrategy team, we thank you for your continued partnership and enthusiasm around the latest technology innovation. As we make our way into the fourth quarter, we’re focused on features to revolutionize the data experience as we know it, providing incredible integration between the data insights users need and the products that users trust.
Stay tuned for what’s next.
Best regards,
Tim Lang
Chief Technology Officer