For years we have been getting requests from our users for a web platform that will give more users in their organization access to the power of Alteryx. The universal theme from many users is that their proprietary data must stay behind their firewall and therefore they need a solution that they can host. With that was born our Alteryx web On-Premise solution. On-Premise was part of the Alteryx 6.2 release that happened in late August and was provided to all of our Alteryx Server customers. It is an installable web application that allows end users to upload Alteryx wizards, manage users and run wizards all via a web browser. In the end providing more users instant acesss to the valuable processing power and output of Alteryx.
Development for our Private Cloud began last spring, and much of the development efforts were focused on creating an easy to use installer that required little interaction and would install all the necessary code, database tables, configure IIS and provide you with a working web application. There were many trials and tribulations during the development effort, and thankfully, we had a very active beta community that worked closely with us to work out the many subtleties involved with installing a web application in many different environments.
I am excited to share, now that the product has been released, there are many rave reviews from our customers. At the same time feedback for enhancements has started to come in. Based on valuable feedback from our customers we have prioritized the list of feature requests and we have started developing for the 7.0 release coming in February 2012.
For 7.0 we are focusing our development efforts in four main areas:
- Permissions. You will be able to create and manage groups of users and assign the groups permissions to individual wizards.
- Scheduling Enhancements. The web platform will be integrating with the new Scheduler that is being developed by the engine team. The use of the new scheduler provides the freedom for wizard jobs to run as the logged in user versus as the network service.
- Active Directory. You will be able to use Active Directory as your authentication mechanism. When installing you will be able to choose to use your Active Directory domain or use our built in authentication.
- Viewing YXDBs and PCXML files. We want all users to be able to view YXDB and PCXML files without having to have our software installed and without having to download them to your local machine.
Beta users can preview these features in an upcoming Beta releases of Alteryx. Please send an email to products@alteryx.com if you are interested in participating in our Beta program.