eazyBI Remote Community Day 2020

| Fri, May 29, 2020 | News & Events | Atlassian Products | 0 comments

We were delighted to be able to attend the eazyBI Community Day 2020 live stream event on May 14th 2020. Originally scheduled to take place in Riga, Latvia, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the change to a remote event allowed us to attend remotely from our own homes. We felt eazyBI did a great job of transferring the event to a whole day live-stream format whilst still providing informative and interesting sessions.

What is the eazyBI Community Day?

Now in its fourth year, the eazyBI community Day is a way for the eazyBI community to come together to hear updates and tips from the experts and from each other. Alongside the live-streamed presentations, eazyBI set-up a slack channel for participants so we were still provided the opportunity to learn and network with our fellow remote attendees.

eazyBI enables users to create business intelligence reports, charts and dashboards with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool. Data can be imported from multiple sources including SLQ, Excel and REST and complex features such as defining your own reporting formulas using the MDX query language can be utilized after gaining a bit more experience. We are big fans of eazyBI and have been implementing their tools in our bespoke solutions for many years now and use them for our own business intelligence reports.

Over the past two years some of New Verve’s own team members have spoken at the Community Days and it is an event we have found to be very relevant to our customers. Last year our Developer Victor Lee presented with our client Peter Hinds, Head of Operations at Synergy Learning, on a project reporting solution using eazyBI and Profields. In 2018, Kris Siwiec, our Technical Lead, showed how eazyBI can be combined with the Tempo product suite for portfolio oversight.

What did we learn?

We gained a lot of insights from the remote event which has helped us to reinforce and add-to our eazyBI knowledge. Here’s some key takeaways to try and sum up the day:

The event started with an opening keynote from eazyBI founder and CEO, Raimonds Simanovskis, which revealed the latest updates like the release of eazyBI 6 which gives us some sleek new design features and is compatible with Atlassian Design. The enhanced designs were expanded on in the final presentation of the day where the topic was the changes in the User Interface (UI). Not only are there now new colours available but eazyBI has also worked on improving how reports are displayed and have enhanced the import options screen over the years. It is clear that eazyBI have been listening to their customers as they based the changes on feedback gathered from client support emails and the customer and partner community pages.

There was an emphasis put on the customer experience throughout all the presentations and Raimonds also announced the updates they have made to training and support features. New training videos are now available in cooperation with Atlassian University and they have introduced a new feature of email support which allows you to see previous conversations.

Presentations

There were lots of fantastic presentations throughout the day that expanded on features of eazyBI and emphasized how we can get the most of out of their tools. This year, unlike previous years, all presentations were given by eazyBI team members which gave a deeper insight into the features. Here’s a few tips and tricks we picked up:

• Did you know collaboration on Confluence can be measured by eazyBI? Confluence for eazyBI offers powerful metrics on page views, updates and task completion, these reports can be shared in various systems.
• Jira Admin gadgets can be used in eazyBI to effectively consolidate all reports in a single tool.
• Jira and eazyBI can share a database but it is suggested that a database is dedicated to eazyBI to avoid data overwrite (memory issues can be solved by optimizing reports and calculated measures rather than adding more memory).
• As eazyBI builds reports on different data sources, it’s important to import the external system’s data from the location where they are stored in Jira. Reports can benefit from calculated members and hierarchies in the data.
• Only use a handful of meaningful measures in the burn up or down charts and for scopes that change frequently - the history can be used to track the changes and create accurate reports.

EazyBI tips for new users?

1. Explore the dimensions, the predefined measures, properties and chart types
2. Don’t rush with the MDX query language - they offer a lot of features that don’t require it
3. Most of all, enjoy the journey!

The topic of MDX was featured throughout the day as it can often seem daunting to new eazyBI users. MDX stands for ‘multi-dimensional expressions’ and it is the main query language implemented by Mondrian, eazyBI’s chosen OLAP reporting engine. eazyBI took us behind complex filters and discussed MDX vs JavaScript custom fields:

• MDX: will cover most scenarios & effectively uses imported data although it could get complex and impact performance
• JavaScript: calculate values for a new field defined in eazyBI advanced settings

Reports, measures and properties are highly contextual and some can only be used with certain types of data. Tip: know which information is returned by using dimensions and measures before diving into the MDX as not all functions are available for all variable types.

eazyBI definitely recommended not to rush with MDX and to know your toolbox so you can explore eazyBI’s BI options. When creating small reports without MDX, know the building blocks you already have and use the cool features to create an effective report without the complexity of MDX.

If you missed the event or would like to learn more, all the presentations from the day were recorded and are ready for you to watch on the eazyBI customer and partner community page.

What next?

Start building reports with eazyBI!

eazyBI put on a great remote event and we look forward to joining them again for future events - in person and online! The Community Days provide a great opportunity to get involved in the eazyBI community and learn from the experts and like-minded peers. Watch out for future eazyBI events here.

To find out more about our bespoke reporting solutions using eazyBI check out the solutions page on our website. Alternatively please get in touch to discuss a custom reporting solution that fits the needs of your business.