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

One thing that has tripped us up is that panel level segments are not applied to the fallout report in the same way as Ad Hoc Analysis.

To recreate the same affect you have to add the segment to every touchpoint which is a pain.

I was wondering if Adobe might consider aligning this? (or at least explaining why they are different)

Workspace: Make Fallout visualization respect hit level panel segments

Most people replying to this thread seem to have similar ideas...that workspace is the much needed upgrade to the standard reports. Instead of trying to replicate ad-hoc analysis into workspace, Adobe should be looking to ensure all functionality available in the standard reports is available in workspace (e.g. Calendar Events). And then leave ad-hoc analysis for the analysts to be able to quickly drill down further.

It is undoubtedly much quicker than workspace and most importantly you can export 50k rows. I know this functionality is 'in the pipeline' for Adobe...but that means until then we have the limited capabilities of data warehouse or spend weeks downloading 400 rows at a time...it's just not feasible. Our solution has had to be that we set up a clickstream feed and force our business outside of the tool...which means we become supplier agnostic.

I've seen, on the Ad-Hoc product/download screen, that there is now a version that can be used with Java 11. Will this version also be killed off or will it continue you work when you end of life Ad hoc?

Thanks.

Adobe team - Any update to the state of workspace?  Trying to come to terms and migrate my workflows, but it seems a lot of capability is still missing, and I keep running into issues like the attached.  Would love updated timeframes on some of this stuff.

First, let me start off by saying that I think Workspace is a great tool.  I've been very impressed by the progress made on it in the last 2 years.  It started out only having a few simple visualization options, etc. and now it's a really rich tool.  Little things like doing side-by-side date comparisons in the same table are great features recently added and much appreciated.

That being said, as a "power user," it still isn't at the point where I can do in-depth analysis.  It is mainly a performance issue, which I know has been brought up many times by other folks.  However, if I cannot even get a fairly simple Workspace to load the first panel and let me interact with the first visualization, I cannot even start my work while waiting for the entire workspace to load.  This has plagued Workspace since the very beginning and I have not noticed any improvement in performance wrt load times and being able to interact with the workspace while the entire thing is loading.

This past Cyber Monday, Nov 26, I was contacted by a former director asking if I was able to get any data from Adobe.  Her team and our BI team in charge of automated reporting were not even able to log in, let alone get any info.  I opened up Workspace and after a minute of waiting for it to load, I decided to open Ad Hoc in parallel.  Ad Hoc loaded as typical and I was easily and quickly able to get hourly visits for this year's Cyber Monday and last year's.  I switched over to Workspace and it still had not even loaded the first panel or first visualization.  It was a very simple project with maybe 2 tables for daily visits and UVs.  I think I had 3 segments applied but the timeframe was only set for the last week so it should not have taken very long to load such a basic project.  Perhaps that was a rare occurrence due to Cyber Monday traffic highs.

Yesterday I was working in Workspace.  Again, it was a very simple project, but it had 9 graphs for the last 90 days and 9 corresponding hidden tables.  I was graphing visits, UVs, and PVs with basic dimensions like day, channel, english vs. spanish, etc.  At first Workspace was working fine, but as I kept tweaking it, the entire project would freeze.  This went on for the entire hour that I was trying to work on this dashboard.  I was not even trying to do analysis, just simple setting up a dashboard for a team to get daily updates.  I do not know if anyone else experiences these issues, but I run into them on a regular basis using very simple workspaces.  I've found that even if I only look at 7 days with day as the dimension, if I have more than 3-4 tables (not even graphs!), it freezes up. 

An average project of mine in Discover has 2-4 workspaces and 4-6 reports within each.  The reports range from simple tables of visits to flow reports.  The reports span 3 years and have different time granularities as well as some use page url dimension, etc.  While one report is loading, I can easily switch back and forth to other reports in the project and I am not delayed at all.  This kind of parallel work is NOT possible in Adobe Workspace right now for the type of work that I do on a daily basis.

Please please please do not discontinue Ad Hoc.  Minimally, please maintain it so that it remains relevant and working on Windows 10 and beyond.

Thanks!

Hi All,

It was nice of Adobe to provide a forum here to discuss and log our discontent with this decision. However, after reading their responses, in my opinion, it seems they are not seriously entertaining the group's general consensus to reverse the sunset decision.

I have created a simple petition to show them how many of us there are. My initial goal is to gather as many signatures as possible and get this into the hands of the right decision makers in Adobe Senior Mgmt. My ultimate goal is to change their minds!

Petition Viva La Ad Hoc!

I hope you'll sign it and also share it with your various colleagues, groups, circles, etc.

We still have a lot of time. Together and with the help of the awesome Adobe Analytics community I honestly believe we can accomplish the goal of retaining Ad Hoc Analysis as a supported product.

I welcome anyone's feedback.

All the best,

Rob

Good morning. I don't know if it has been mentioned, but another key feature that needs to go in workspace if this is to replace ad hoc the ability to download 20K rows of information. Currently you can only pull what is displayed.

Real question, Jen/Adobe: what will it take to get you to reverse this decision? I honestly can't envision my day-to-day without ad hoc. If it's true that only 8% of the users utilize the tool can you also look at how much time is spent logged in to the adobe platform by those 8% verses the 92%? I bet it's close to half if not more. You're hurting your power users (likely your loudest advocates as well) and that seems like a mistake from a business perspective. Maybe it's a money saver but at what "true cost"??

Hey jen.lasser,

I wanted to take the opportunity to chime in with some thoughts.  I appreciate the transparency and the requests for feedback, and while I share the displeasure of many others in this thread, I understand Adobe's point of view - it's simply not cost effective to maintain multiple tool-sets that could potentially be rolled into one tool, ideally covering all user needs.

As someone who has (on multiple occasions) been a part of talks debating migrating an organization from Adobe Analytics to a competing tool, I can tell you that it's the 8-10% of power users in the organization that make that final call.  The remaining 90% of occasional users in the org rely on the tools that the core analytics team ultimately selects to implement.  These users tend to use the simplest, most user-friendly toolsets available.  For the 8-10%, Ad-hoc analysis, and more generally the ability to perform advanced deep dive analysis, has always been the main sticking point in these conversations - Adobe, in the past, has been ahead of the competition in this area.

However, this is less and less the case.  Knowing the advanced toolsets are being stripped out, and with little confidence in the proposed replacements, Adobe continues to lose ground in this area.  Your main competitor has recently introduced their 'advanced analysis' toolset to compete with workspace analysis.  But what's far more important and relevant than this, is they now allow for a one-click integration into an Enterprise level, cloud-based data warehouse.  This solution allows customers to use toolsets of their selection for advanced analysis (See Looker, Tableau, R, etc.) in a way that doesn't require constant limited exports and extracts of Data, and jumping through Hoops to get out of Adobe's walled garden.

What the retirement of Ad-Hoc analysis truly does, is highlight true shortcomings of the product for advanced users.  I'm obviously only one person, with knowledge of experiences and opinions from only a few colleagues at a few organizations.  While I respect the use of data to drive your product roadmap forwards, I hope you have taken customer segmentation into account, and are listening to the needs of your clients that drive analytics roadmaps within their organizations.

Like lots of others in here, I think it is a real shame that Ad-hoc is being killed as it is by far the best analysis tool in the AA suite. Workspace is nice for dashboards and quick analysis but doesn't hold a candle to Ad-Hoc for deeper analysis.

The one thing that would severely lessen the pain of being forced to use Workspace is if you brought in the table builder from Ad-hoc. Another user posted this idea earlier this year. https://forums.adobe.com/ideas/10223#comment-224880. This would make it much quicker to create and alter reports.