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Employee
July 27, 2018

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

  • July 27, 2018
  • 27 replies
  • 53128 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.

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27 replies

New Participant
August 15, 2018

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
New Participant
August 17, 2018

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

New Participant
August 17, 2018

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.

Christian_Peer_
New Participant
August 13, 2018

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

Employee
August 15, 2018

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_
New Participant
August 16, 2018

Hi George,

there is an existing idea xlsx-Export for Workspace

The problem is the German numeral system.

New Participant
August 13, 2018

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

katiem5932052
New Participant
August 10, 2018

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!

JenLa5Author
Employee
August 13, 2018

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
New Participant
August 15, 2018

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?

New Participant
August 10, 2018

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.

JenLa5Author
Employee
August 13, 2018

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.

New Participant
August 13, 2018

Sure thing Jen - This was the original request:

Analysis Workspace: Compact Report Stylesheet

New Participant
August 10, 2018

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.

New Participant
August 10, 2018

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? 

JenLa5Author
Employee
August 10, 2018

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.

New Participant
August 13, 2018

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.