App tour

Firstly – we wanted to revisit and improve the user experience – whether the user is an experienced analyst or a total novice. The app is more welcoming and offers help to discover the features, while at the same time facilitates a more intuitive interaction with different interfaces.

We’re rolling out the red carpet – our new users will appreciate an application tour popup – a dismissible sequence of hints to guide them through the basics on the Welcome screen, in the workflow app and on the report pages. Not a paperclip in sight!

Improved workflow building UX

The busy workflow builders will notice the new responsive magnetic auto-connection between the workflow blocks, when adding a new block or moving existing blocks around,

The whole blocks‘ palette can be kept open and pinned to the left, as a collapsible panel, to facilitate faster model building.

Add a new data source to an Omniscope workflow in two seconds: drag and drop a source file directly onto the workflow, or drop it onto a File block options screen to upload it to Omniscope.

Dealing with date patterns has gotten easier with the date format dropdowns in the Field Organiser and Report field settings, where the user can search for a pattern or enter a new one to the list.  

Smooth creation of beautiful reports

Once all your charts are in place – why not give your dataviz a quick makeover?
When optimising the report layout for consumption on different device sizes, you can leverage multiple settings to create the best layout(s) for your report:

• You can use the Free-form layout to position, resize, align and layer charts, filters and objects on the page.
• The Multi page option is there when you need multiple scrollable pages in the same tab. The best choice for producing reports that look like documents.
• Regarding the page sizing behaviour you can choose whether your dashboard will keep fixed size and ratio or to adapt and auto stretch to the screen size.

Free form layout

The perfect view proportions are achieved easily in the ‘Free form’ layout with the new snap views feature.  (Select it from the Layout toolbar menu).

It is a user-friendly way to manipulate the charts on the page and create pixel-perfect dashboards by using chart sizing guide lines, while displaying both pixel count and the chart size as a % of the tab width. 

Colours, fonts, borders, templates

The Report styles section now allows you to pick from a list of pre-configured style presets. You can also create your own presets and share them with colleagues as new Report styles (in XML format). The settings packed in these presets are data default colours, custom fonts, report background colours, elegant borders and spacing, as well as button and logo colours. 

Projects page banner

Even the report list page got a bit of a makeover, with the ability to add banners with text, images, gifs and links using Markdown syntax.
Simply add a banner.md file to the projects folder. You will be able to add instructions or display a welcome message for the report consumers when they find themselves facing a long report list…
Read more

App translations

For our users in Asia we’ve improved “Simplified Chinese” translation, so they can interact with the translated menus and application components. We also support custom translations – read more here and let us know if you need help to implement. More info here.

Test and comment – let us know what you think!

The post Improving Omniscope UI and UX appeared first on Visokio.

No matter the topic or the vertical, once you know where is your data, in any form or shape, Omniscope will provide you with a unified data platform and a simple UI to build and deploy customised web apps for data processing, analytics and reporting. And you don’t need to know how to code.

You may have some questions, as starter “how do I access and load data“? Well, Omniscope has enough core workflow blocks to access files, web resources, databases, services, in various formats, from flat files to structured csv, Excel, JSON and XML. You just need to add and configure a block, once, and re-use it whenever you need to.

At this point you could ask: “I’ve got the data, but how do I clean it, see? It’s all messed up.” Well (2), you’ll find a rich data preparation section to solve the usual problems,  like duplicated records, misspelt words, missing values, and to perform typical operations like pivot, transpose, join, append, aggregate, sort, filter and validate data. You will have enough routines for data prep and ETL, to build workflows to load, stream, blend and transform any data.

“But what about data analytics and machine learning, AI?” In the Analytics section we’ve bundled quite a few outstanding blocks, to deal with the most common data problems solved with classic math, statistics and machine learning algorithms. You will be able (point and click) to perform regression to provide causal analysis or to predict the value of missing data. You’ll find groups (clustering), find associations between them (basket analysis) and anomalies in your data. And more, like leveraging time series forecast, network analysis, text analysis and topic modelling. I am sure you will have enough no-code-data-weapons to extract insights.

“Sure, but how do I build the app UX and UI to share my findings?”
Dataviz? All drag-and-drop, from a set of predefined charts and views, you will be able to build reports, dashboards, or simply interactive web content / pages / tabs, allowing your end user to navigate and interact with graphs, select and filter data, drilling down, and even editing and inputting data if you wanted. You will build the final UX for your end users and embed the customised UI on your site or, viceversa, embed any other web component into the Omniscope “report” single page web app.

“Cool, but does it scale?” Data volume should not be a problem. If you need to process big data, data preparation will leverage all your machine / server resources, in a batch streaming fashion where possible. And if your data is on a SQL database, no problem, you will be able to directly live query data, and leverage your cloud SQL DB to power your dashboards.

“OK… what about automation?” It’s the key, right? Once you build your workflows, web reports and dashboards you want to make sure everything comes to life, showing the recent version of data, and reacting on events. The Scheduler app and the Automation API will be there to run parameterised data refresh & report updates, to trigger tasks, data alerts, and configure, edit & query data. You’ll have all the tools to have Omniscope talk to other software or services, and become your friendly robot. You’ll instruct it once, and it’ll do the job for you. while you can use your time wisely to invent more.

“Sounds interesting, so…. where do I run it, do I need a particular machine or device?”
Omniscope is a web app. It was designed to be universal and deliver a fresh and smart experience on any device: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, you just need a web browser, simple (…though better if recent Chrome, Firefox and Edge).
And regarding deployment and security, don’t worry, we won’t see your data. You can install Omniscope on-premises or on your private cloud (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure), and control data and user access / permissions using modern protocols like OIDC and SSO.

The final touch, before you ask: it’s a white-label software: you can host branded data solutions and embedded analytics, get rid of that Visokio Omniscope logo and put your supa-dupa company branding in place. We don’t care about our branding, we only care about building and giving you the best tool for your business.

Ah, and of course, if you are a developer or you’ve got some magic code, be my guest! We made sure you can extend Omniscope and build your own data blocks and custom UI, to augment the data pipelines with your Python / R data transformation and ML/AI scripts , and enhance the web UI with any HTML+JS web components and/or charts.
So you can really achieve the “omni scope” and deliver custom branded data solutions bundling your secret sauce.

Does all this sound like what you’re looking for? Drop us a line, check some demos or give it a go on our public sandbox.

Peace out!

The post No-code Development Platform to build data web apps appeared first on Visokio.

 Not necessarily… Sometimes the winning formula will combine good old tools with innovative solutions. Omniscope provides an environment where any organisation can continue to use Excel for the tasks it’s good for and make it work as a  productive component inside a modern data ecosystem. Xlsx and csv spreadsheets are useful data containers, which are easy to access and edit, but this convenience will inevitably take a toll on the company’s resources, if there is no automated ETL process to take the data from the source to a destination without the human intervention.

How to import, transform or blend Excel data in Omniscope?

a) Super speed: Importing Excel or csv spreadsheets in 2 seconds – just drag and drop a file onto the projects’ list page, or directly onto the data workflow canvas. Omniscope will load the file in the same folder and automatically visualise it! From there you can combine these inputs with data in other formats, from various sources (databases, live feeds or APIs…)

b) Live connection: connect to an Excel or csv spreadsheet on a local or network drive and preserve the connection. Browse to a file location from the File input block. You will be able to establish a live link, so any edits to the file in that location will be reflected and the new data will follow the same transformation process in Omniscope. This can happen on demand – by clicking on the ‘refresh button’ – or via an automated process, using the Scheduler application.

c) Octopus mode: connect to a folder and extract multiple files in one step! If the data storage mechanism collects multiple Excel/csv files in one folder there is no need to drag 52 weekly file blocks to the workflow to get the full picture of your annual data. The ‘Batch append folder’ block can facilitate the extraction of any number of Excel, csv or text files, adding the source field to show where each record came from. (Very useful for audit purposes!) By using the wild character the user can target specific file names or extensions.

 d) Any file, any location – one block to append them all: Extract multiple files from different folders. The ‘Append Files’ block facilitates the extraction of multiple files from any location (machine, network or cloud location) and in any format (not just Excel – CSV, JSON, XML, etc). By default Omniscope will auto-detect the file type and read the contents of the file according to the default options for that file type. The user can configure how Omniscope will read the files by un-ticking ‘Auto detect file type’, then selecting the file type and further options.

Transformation phase – ETL and data quality evaluation

How can the analyst make sure that all those imported Excel files don’t contain any ‘fat finger’ entries, or a messy copy-paste result? Anyone who’s spent more than one Monday morning looking for a typo in a big table will understand that more important than getting the answers fast is making sure that those answers are correct.

You can combine multiple data quality tests inside an Omniscope workflow – start by adding a ‘Validate data’ block to your ETL process. It will screen the data schema (field list and data types), and also evaluate the record count, or the cell values in the target fields. If anything is wrong – a detailed data anomaly list will appear in the block’s diagnostics tab. You will not even have to worry how to remove duplicates – the operation is just a block away… And will be applied every time the new data is appended. More on data quality methods – read here.

Publishing the results

What happens after you’ve imported, validated, augmented and transformed spreadsheet data in Omniscope? You can customise and produce multiple outputs – share clean data with your team, as well as create interactive graphs to allow the users to explore the findings.

There are also options for mass publishing – for those serving hundreds of customised outputs. Use the ‘Batch Output’ block’s spreadsheet interface to define the filtering variation for the data outputs, or ‘Report Generator’ block to create dashboard variations e.g. showing just one country per report.

What about the price of this additional software? Excel is cheap… Think again – Excel is not automating your data management! The amount of man (and woman) hours lost on the manual data transformation / cleaning (copy/paste, rename, search/replace, pivot, then again?), and the time taken fishing for the data faults adds up to more cost than most modern data management tools. By far the biggest danger to an organisation is the cost of not having the right information at the right time or having incorrect data as a basis for decision-making!

Humble spreadsheets are here to stay, however, you may wish to make changes to how Excel is used and integrate it inside a modern data management system to allow it to excel!

The post Excel formula for success is +1: learn how to complement it with Omniscope appeared first on Visokio.

But how about security? How to run a script in a isolated sandbox so you can be sure it’s not going to harm your machine, service or environment.

A while back we’ve introduced the concept of Custom Blocks in Omniscope. Basically anyone can build their own block by using Python or R to expand the set of blocks we bundle and to enable our users to augment their workflow with any scripts, from new analytics algorithms to simple data transformation routines.
However, such scripts have unrestricted access to the filesystem… so you would have to trust your workflow-permissioned users and the designers who create those blocks.
We’ve then decided to make our Omniscope users life easier, and safer!
Omniscope 2021.2 lets you execute all your custom blocks in a Docker container, via a server-wide policy, where the script code is completely isolated from the server – and its file system other than where configured via options (to mount and map single files or folders).

Set up Docker Desktop (Windows/Mac) or Docker daemon (Linux) and you are ready to go. Read more here

Want to try out? Feel free to use our public sandbox on http://daily.omniscope.me . Happy and safe coding!

The post Secure Python / R scripts execution in Docker with Omniscope appeared first on Visokio.

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The Slack API WebClient connector allows you to execute any permissioned Slack API method, meaning you can also use it to set options, join channels, kick users, post messages on channels and automate any action in a data-driven way.

Got Omniscope Evo handy? Download the projects to experiment at your end.

The post How to import any data from a Slack workspace and analyse it in Omniscope Evo appeared first on Visokio.