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

For everyone following this thread, we are holding a webinar this Thursday that might help shed some light around this topic:

Adobe Analytics Insider Webinar: Ad Hoc Analysis migrates to Analysis Workspace

One of the powerful things about Ad Hoc Analysis is the ability to use the site analysis report to understand the typical pathways between 2 points on the website i.e. a flow visualization where you can define a start point and end point of the flow

(The existing workspace "flow" visualization allows you to define a start point or an end point so does not help do this).

It's going to be hugely frustrating not being able to do this kind of analysis :-(

Workspace:New flow visualization - how users navigate between 2 points 

A huge thank you to everyone for their feedback thus far. Keep in mind that we are talking about events that are almost a year out from now - we wanted to give plenty of warning so we wouldn't pull the rug out from anyone. And based on this thread, it's a good thing the conversation started this early - workspace still definitely has some improvements to make!

We have heard your voice loud and clear that you don't want Ad Hoc to go away. Our intention is to not remove tools from your use, but rather focus our development efforts on a more refined set to better enable you in your role. Analysis Workspace is where most development and refining efforts are going to take place. Strategically, it will allow Adobe to develop more features for in-depth analysis, instead of maintaining multiple tools.

Based on responses so far, Workspace has its use for quick numbers and good visuals, but Ad Hoc is more used for deep dives and in-depth analysis. If row limit and performance weren't an issue in Analysis Workspace, what are the biggest obstacles that prevent you from from doing deep dives and thorough investigations in the tool? We have plenty of time before the tool is sunset, so the more we discuss missing critical features, the more refined and developed Workspace will be this time next year. Linking idea threads here would be ideal, and ensuring the idea thread contains use cases/struggles your organization has will allow us to ensure those features meet your needs.

Lastly, thank you for keeping things civil and professional here. I know that this is absolutely a charged topic, and I appreciate that no one's responses have come down to flaming or insults.

I see Workspace more as another reporting application, it's not a replacement for Ad-Hoc. It's sort of a half way point between Ad-Hoc and Reports and Analytics. Where, if I were to desire to, I could make my discovery in Ad-Hoc and export the reports to Workspace as a distribution tool. 

We don't need another report builder – we can do that outside of Adobe with a variety of applications, but we do need a discovery tool. Ad-Hoc allows you to quickly duplicate a report to drill down different dimensions, add different segments, compare different metrics to make discoveries and insights and stress test the results. In discovery I will frequently max out every report tab of every workspace tab, labeling them all along the way to refer back to. Also it allows you to easily create Segments and Calculated Metrics which I can then bring into report builder for customized dashboards that can involve things like retention rates at different steps, fall out rates, user pathing, etc. Using the Web tool I simply wouldn't have the amount of time necessary to create the amount of calculated metrics to use the report builder tool effectively.

I fear this move could reduce Adobe Analytics’ capabilities to vanity metrics. Visits year over year, visits by channel, visits by device, a basic fallout report, etc. Sure, I can use the Workspace platform as a report distribution tool. But my actionable insights would likely have to come from another analytics application. And since that’s the case I might as well just load the data I need into Tableau for my data visualization, further alienating the actual analysis from Adobe. I can see why from a “Looking Down” perspective that Adobe would think they are duplicating their efforts supporting both Ad-Hoc and Workspace, but I think the majority of users would prefer to see better integrations between the two platforms.

Is this a cruel joke??!

Adobe needs to reconsider this decision.  There is NO POSSIBILITY that Workspace will be an adequate replacement for Ad Hoc Analysis. 

As others have noted, manipulating the data using Java is much quicker than a web-based product ever will be.

What is the cost-savings for Adobe for eliminating their power-analysis product?

This is devastating, I just developed a whole lot of web metrics reports using data downloaded from Adhoc Analysis. The workspace won't allow me to download 50K+ row of urls, will it? Could you tell me what other tools I could use to download large number of data?

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.

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.

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