February 23, 2017 – 17:06
When comparing Qlik Sense to QlikView, the most obvious differences are on the front-end, with its completely overhauled and fully responsive design. Other major differences are the server-based development, the use of Master Items and the shift towards APIs, mashups, extensions and widgets.
Somewhat less prominent, though very deserving of your attention, is the security model in Qlik Sense. This has a completely new approach compared to QlikView, and you can pretty much create endless variations. Rather than hacking stuff together and hoping it works, my colleague Rik and I recently decided to take a more structured approach and do some R&D on Sense security rules. Our goal was to gain more understanding of security in Sense, develop methods for gathering and modeling security requirements and to design reference patterns for common implementation scenarios.
We will be sharing some of the methods and patterns that we came up with in an upcoming white paper. In the mean time, I’d like to share with you some of the little interesting, strange and otherwise noteworthy things that we found. These range from basic to slightly obscure, but all should hopefully help you get more understanding of Qlik Sense security rules. Let’s start with noting that the approach in Sense is totally different than it was in QlikView…
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February 16, 2017 – 22:06
The 2017 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms has been released and Qlik is in the Leaders quadrant for the 7th consecutive year! Besides Qlik, both Tableau and Microsoft return in the Leaders quadrant, where they also were last year.
Comparing this edition with previous year’s Magic Quadrant, we can see that Qlik has lost around 15% on Completeness of vision, while more or less keeping the same Ability to execute. At the same time, we can see that both Tableau and Microsoft have both significantly improved their lead in these areas. I haven’t seen the actual analyst report yet so the reasons for these changes remain speculation at this time. (will update with a link once a vendor releases it for free).
Update 2017/02/22: the full report can be found here.
Looking at the multi-year trend, we can see that Business Discovery has truly become mainstream while the previously dominant ‘Mega Vendors’ have been downgraded to the middle of the pack (look where IBM was in 2013, and where it is now). The positive exception here is Microsoft, which seems to have reinvented themselves in the past few year (Power BI!).
Happy new year to you! Just a very short post today with a little fun and possibly a warning. You may be aware that you can use the Qlik Sense API’s on your Qlik Sense Desktop, but are you also aware that any webpage can access them? The widget on the top right contains some JavaScript that tries to connect to your local Qlik Sense Desktop, if it succeeds the version and number of apps are displayed. (click on the X Applications link for an application browser)
This is just some harmless fun of course, and potentially offers some nice options for Qlik bloggers, for example click to automatically generate an app, online performance analyzer, etc. Just be aware that there could also be more nefarious purposes, for example deleting applications or extracting data. It’s probably very unlikely that someone will target this, but good to keep in mind anyway.
On a different note, Qlik Sense 3.1 SR4 was released yesterday. And, if you’re based in The Netherlands (or willing to travel there) and interested in Qlik Sense web development with mashups, extensions and widgets then we have an interesting training coming up. More info here (in Dutch, but training will be in English, contact me if you’re interested).
February 12, 2016 – 09:00
The 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms was released last February 4. This year’s edition caused quite a stir on various blogs and social media platforms as most of the ‘old-school’ vendors were dropped from the Leaders quadrant, leaving only Tableau, Microsoft and Qlik as Leaders.
Many excellent blog posts appeared in the last week, providing further commentary and thoughts on the current state of the BI and Analytics market. Rather than adding another post with my own commentary, I will take a slightly different approach.
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November 13, 2015 – 03:17
Want to build a quick dashboard or analyze some data? Want to share your findings with others or publish charts on social media? Then the Qlik Sense Cloud might be of interest to you. This cloud version of Qlik Sense has been available since September 2014. While it is still in beta, features are steadily being added. Best of all, it is completely free!
You can upload up to 250MB of your own data, but can also get external data from the Qlik DataMarket (for example information on exchange rates, demographics, weather or businesses) to augment your internal data.
A use case
The missus and I are expecting a baby early next year. Picking a name, in my opinion, is no easy task. I don’t want my kid to have the same name as 5 other kids in his class, but also not a really obscure name (like “Bamboo”, “Patient”, “Berlusconi” or “Zorro”, names that were actually given to some unfortunate kids in the Netherlands in 2014). To make things a little easier, I downloaded a list of all the baby names that were given in the Netherlands in 2014, loaded it into a Sense Cloud App and shared it with my wife. Now we can easily filter names based on popularity, length, letters, etc. and see what we like. It’s nothing too fancy, but the fact that we can use it from a tablet or our phone without having to install anything makes it a lot more convenient and fun.
Want to try the Qlik Sense Cloud?
If you would like to give the Qlik Sense Cloud a try, then enter your email address in the form below. You will then automatically receive an invite for my shared space on the Qlik Cloud. This will give you access to any applications that I publish to the Qlik Cloud and will also give you the option to create your own applications. (email addresses are only used to send the invites and are not stored)
