Introduction
Analysis Workspace is a powerful tool for curating reports and dashboards in Adobe Analytics. Very often one needs to share the ad-hoc reports and dashboards with stakeholder. These reports could be very important to the stakeholders as well as teams inside your organization.
This feature has been released by Adobe on a huge demand from the Analytics users. This feature allows the analysts or reporting teams to share the workspace reports or dashboard with any individual, yes you heard it right "any individual". That means these individuals do not need to be an user of Adobe Analytics group in your organization to see the workspace projects. Earlier this was not the case.
In the latest release for Adobe has introduced a very important feature. The feature "Share> Share with anyone" in Analysis workspace helps you to share these Analysis Workspace projects with the end users without giving them access to Adobe Analytics. This is so cool!
How is this new workflow different?
Analysis workspace had an option to share the projects and dashboard via a sharable link. However those link used to works for the user who already has access to Analytics instance for the respective organization. The new workflow introduced a new option "Share with anyone" which allows you to share the project with users who do not have access to Adobe Analytics instance.
Or you could also share it outside your organization not intentionally but accidently. Are you also thinking about the same thing what I am thinking right now?
The impact of sharing workspace projects without logging in?
Security
As an employee you always want to protect any sensitive information to leak outside the organization. While sharing a link to an important report which don't requires anyone to login, can cause situations accidently leaking sensitive information outside the organization. With this new offering organization have to be extra careful while using this featuring.
Adobe allows the administrators to disable this option for the complete organization if needed. Please check the help document how to disable this option.
Performance Impact
This may come as a surprise to a few of us, however, it could certainly put an impact on your reporting performance. To understand this, let's discuss how Adobe Analytics instance works for an organization. Adobe assigns a few dedicated and shared resources (servers) to execute the tasks/reports in your Adobe Analytics instance.
Data Warehouse is an example of a shared resource. Data feed, Analysis workspace, Scheduled Projects, etc. are some of the reports which run on the dedicated resource assigned to an organization.
While creating or opening a workspace project or dashboard, it utilizes the Analytics Reporting APIs to fetch the data from servers to feed these reports. These APIs run in real-time and every time someone opens a report it consumes a certain amount of these APIs. These APIs runs on dedicated resource assigned to the AA instance. The real challenge is not sharing the projects with individuals inside the organization but, how many people individually access these dashboards. All these individual request will hits the APIs and will cause a significant burden to the whole eco-system. Each opening of these dashboards will multiply the complexity. Such concurrent request has a defined limit and how many queries can run at once. Here is how Adobe has defined the limits:
Reference document
This means you may be over-utilizing the resources of analytics instance, if these dashboard are opened/refreshed frequently by many users OR these links are not managed and distributed properly with a well managed structure. Also note that, 5 concurrent queries is the limit for individual report suite inside the whole organization. That means such performance issue will hamper all the user who are creating/viewing reports inside that report suites. In such situations, users will have to wait for the data to show up in the reports. It will impact the users who are working on creating new dashboards as well as those who want to see these numbers in real-time.
You might not notice the impact of this workflow on normal days however, this could create a huge problem during the most critical days such as Holiday sales where you are expecting huge traffic from website and lot of people will be working on creating new dashboards when you want to see the data in real-time.
What is the solution?
Now that we have discussed how this feature could impact the business, let's discuss how to avoid such situations. This feature could be very useful and handy for sharing information within the organization however, one must be very careful while sharing the links. In my opinion, sharing the workspace projects and dashboards via PDF makes much more sense instead. This process of sharing the links requires utilizing APIs each time you refresh or open the project on the other hand viewing the reports in PDF don’t only requires to calculate these number only once additionally you can schedule to receive the most important projects on hourly concurrency.
Conclusion
Overall the option of viewing the workspace project without login is very helpful but it has to be used very carefully. The organization should decide whether they should use this option or not. Administrators can keep this option disabled for safety and better performance.
Better Late than Never!
It's possible that you might not see this option in your organization. This feature is currently not GA and not rolled out to all organizations.