Adobe Employee

Intention to End-of-life Ad Hoc Analysis (Discover) announced

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
July 27, 2018
27 replies
53118 views

On August 6, 2018, Adobe announced plans to end-of-life Ad Hoc Analysis, as well as the Discover point-product. Ad Hoc Analysis functionality and capabilities are being moved to Analysis Workspace. It is common practice for Adobe to announce plans to deprecate a technology at least one year in advance, to give our customers plenty of time to migrate projects, learn new workflows and ease into the transition. To ensure all users make a smooth transition, Adobe is targeting Q3 2019 to deprecate Ad Hoc Analysis. For more information, visit https://adobe.ly/discoverworkspace.

In support of this announcement, we are working toward improving 3 primary workflows in Analysis Workspace, giving you the ability to:

1) Build advanced queries, without having to wait for individual components to build

2) Download 50K rows from freeform tables

3) Remove repeat instances from Flow

A date for end-of-life/access will not be set until these workflows are improved.

This thread has been created to provide a channel for feedback about the announcement.

Analytics

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E

egolf

Level 2

Boo!!! I love ad-hoc analysis. Analysis work-space is nice, but still isn't as user friendly as ad-hoc. Loading everything in a browser seems to be much slower.

Could we do a poll of people that do not like this?

J

JenLa5

Author

Adobe Employee

Thanks for the feedback! We are working on a solution that will allow you to build freeform tables more quickly. Would love to get your feedback if you are willing to participate in some research. Please DM me your email address if so.

A

annej81175329

Level 1

I agree here, the ability to easily change rows and columns data (in particular columns with multiple dimensions), is a major benefit of ad hoc. The tabbed interface is also a lot easier to easily see different reports of different granularity.

Its a real shame to discontinue a product that allows such rich analysis - which isn't available in workspace. Its very difficult to get valuable business insights from workspace and perform deepdive 'analysis'. Workspace has along way to come to get to that level. I see this as a move which forces businesses to create their own data warehouse solutions which need data scientist to use the tools. It takes away a valuable tool that is used by AA experts who don't necessarily have data scientist skills to use the alternative tools.

A

aeckmanbc

Level 1

Agree, AdHoc allows me to combine multiple dimensions to deep dive into reports much more easily and quickly. I'm happy to provide feedback to make sure this ability is in the new tool.

J

J2_2

Level 4

Hello Adobe and thanks for posting to get feedback - I outlined some concerns here In a post about 6 months back:

Ad Hoc will no longer be supported - concerns?

Here's something that needs fixing in Workspaces:

Fix Granularity Representation on Export

One other thing I would like to see is a compact view. There's way too much effort to make it look like an i-phone I'm a data guy, we don't work on tablets that require big buttons, we work on desktops and multiple screens

I don't like a bubbly pretty interface, as it's harder to use if I have to scroll all the time - a more practical option would be great.

Example below:

My Data in Ad Hoc:

Same Data in Workspaces, same screen (I can only see 7 hours worth, where in ad-hoc you can see the whole data set and then some):

Sad it's going away, but the data supports your decision, so I respect that.

J

JenLa5

Author

Adobe Employee

jharrington7897: Thanks for the feedback on the condensed style sheet. Please log that idea in the forums separate from this string so we can keep the conversation going and better understand the demand.

J

J2_2

Level 4

Sure thing Jen - This was the original request:

Analysis Workspace: Compact Report Stylesheet

katiem5932052

Level 2

You need to be able to schedule reports to deliver to FTP. My company transitioned to a new product that doesn't include Ad Hoc. I can do almost everything else I need in Workspace, but miss the ability to schedule a file to deliver to an FTP daily, weekly, monthly. Thanks!

J

JenLa5

Author

Adobe Employee

katiem5932052 Thanks! Can you please log this as an idea in the Forums, separate from this thread? That will help us assess demand & prioritize.

katiem5932052

Level 2

I can post wherever you like, but need more direction. You asked for feedback on "The Forums", and I posted. Where specifically would you like me to post?

A

ashert33772002

Level 2

This is definitely going to be a blow for myself and those I work with. We live in Ad Hoc on a daily basis.

Workspace is nice for building out reports for non-Analysts but trying to drill down into data to get insights is slower. Just getting started takes more time due to the lack of a Table builder. Much nicer to assemble all the components and then run versus having to add every piece one by one.

Workspace feels to me like the much needed upgrade to the Reports and Analytics interface.

Please leave Ad Hoc for those of us who perform deeper analysis

Christian_Peer_

Level 2

The workspace is great but without xlsx format AdHoc is not replaceable for European customers.

B

Brandon_George1

Adobe Employee

Thanks for the feedback - we would love to understand more why CSV is not sufficient (as opposed to full-blown XLSX), especially since CSV opens just fine in Excel.

Christian_Peer_

Level 2

Hi George,

there is an existing idea xlsx-Export for Workspace

The problem is the German numeral system.

E

Evanaster

Level 2

Downloading reports in Workspace is too time-consuming especially when Adobe servers are overwhelmed. Ad Hoc is great because you can COPY THE DATA DIRECTLY without a download. So we'll get the "Email this report to make it faster" and stare at our inboxes waiting for a report that would take a second to copy in Ad Hoc.

PLEASE REVISIT THIS DECISION!

ebr64

Level 2

I’ve never seen the "Email this report to make it faster" message in Workspace. Only in Reports and didn’t happen to me for years (maybe because I’m not using Reports anymore )

I was a fan of Ad-Hoc but I’ve switched to Workspace 100%. This tool changed our life as a Digital Analytics team since it’s a lot easier to use by business users, which means we can focus on advanced analysis or just build a template for them when they struggle.

Of course it’s not perfect and it still lacks a bit of performance for heavy reports and a bit of governance to manage hundreds of projects that everyone is creating. I’m not fan of the tagging system for this.

I’ve been following the « do not retire please » discussion in the past days and I think the most important missing features have been discussed already.

Oh and by the way, you can now copy directly the data from Workspace now.

Just my $0.02

Eric

E

Evanaster

Level 2

Thanks good to hear you can copy data directly in Workspace. But the fact remains that a web based interface will be slower than Ad Hoc and it won’t have all of the functionality of Ad Hoc.

katiem5932052

Level 2

I just up-voted the already existing idea: Workspace to FTP

H

H_L

Level 7

Read from the notification, I saw the data said there's about only 8% are utilizing Ad Hoc analysis.

But I believe you also considered and understood about the user group, most of users might be business users, only small portions are real analysts and need to proceed deep-dive.

To me, Ad hoc analysis is a great tool to deep dive by using complicated combination of dimensions and segments, in analysts-friendly interface, the operation to copy and paste, drag and drop multi-segments, data granularities to another new created tab is good, I also can create many tabs and operating in one while waiting for others "retrieving data".

In Adhoc, I can also easily "create segment" in one tab (report), drag and drop easily, do the validation, and save the one I want among all the created test segments.

AND the SITE ANALYSIS is super helpful.

I tried to convert some reports in Adhoc to Workspace, frankly speak, the result is not that well.

But sure, the web version of workspace is great as well, e.g., the "flow" chart if more easy to read. But it requires the Browser's performance as well, so when I did complicate table in web-version, I always get "not-responding" and have to wait for a while.

Comparing with "web version workspace", I can easily to adjust the template in Ad hoc once any changes is required after look into "exported" report from Ad Hoc.

I would say, the web-version is a good visualized tool to common business users or decision makers to read the dashboard, but the ad-hoc is an essential tool, vital to deep-dive, to complicated analysis.

The deep-dive analysis job is complicate enough, many dimensions and aspects need to consider,

so,

why make another complex at "operation" level in analysts' daily work?

I hope to keep "Ad hoc" alive, or any other plans, other than web-version workspace.

Remember, it's named: Adobe ad hoc analysis or Adobe Discover, but not Adobe Track and Report.

Thanks in advance for the consideration.

R

ryand17293691

Level 1

I agree wholeheartedly here. I've trained close to a hundred stakeholders with their own fresh new Reports and Analytics access over the years. All they do once in a while is log on to check a number here or there. Then when they want any real analysis done they reach back out to my team to do the heavy lifting, and we all use Adhoc. Point being, i think those stakeholders are skewing your results.

Furthermore Adhoc is the tool that I feel sets you apart from your competition. I'm comfortable in Reports & Analytics, as well as Workspace, but whenever I'm investigation a problem I always start in Adhoc, by far my comfort zone and the most powerful and time efficient.

I truly hope this doesn't happen.

E

Evanaster

Level 2

This is all about a cost savings for Adobe which is very unfortunate. Yes just 8 percen of users use Ad Hoc, but they are the power adobe analysts who now will need to work with a tool made for the masses. Might as well switch over to Google Analytics then if we have no say in keeping this tool. Thanks Adobe.

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