Anaplan’s New Release! What’s Next?

The second Anaplan release of 2016 will soon be available. It features the standard improvements of each new release, new Apps, new features for Dashboard construction in particular, but also real innovations, the first building block of what will eventually become true solution lifecycle management and centralized user management.

Let’s start with one of the major innovations of this second release, centralized user maintenance for all your Workspaces. Until now, even basic user information such as ID, first name, and last name was managed at the model level (already a fairly granular configuration level). And information managed at this granular model level could impact the entire Workspace, such as the checkbox granting the Workspace Administrator role. Starting with this release, user management can be performed from a dedicated screen, independent of models and workspaces. With a single click, you now have the power to activate or deactivate users across all your Anaplan models and therefore manage organizational changes, new user creation, role changes, turnover, and promotions. This centralized user management allows you to improve your data security by having better control over user access to your Anaplan models.

And to go into a bit more detail, here is a focus on the features offered by this new centralized user management module:

• User Drilldown: This is the ability to see at a glance the details of user information such as user IDs and the various models and Workspaces they have access to. This should allow you to have better visibility of user rights and to more easily conduct audits to improve your organization’s security.
• Model Drilldown: This is the ability to launch a model-by-model analysis to quickly obtain a global view of users with access to that model, as well as their status and last login date, and therefore potentially rationalize your license costs.
• Model Categorization: Your organization’s growth requires the ability to classify your models within your Workspace. This new feature allows you to categorize your models by business function, by Apps, or by environment (development vs. production). From now on, you can use sorting and filtering features to easily find your various models within the administration console.

Note: this enhancement is available on demand. That is, it will not be applied by default for the moment but only if you request it from support@anaplan.com.

The second major innovation of this release is what Anaplaners call “Application Lifecycle Management” or ALM.

“The future of models: Separating data from structure”

This is not yet the expected revolution for managing your environments (managing a dedicated development environment and transporting configuration to a production environment), but it is a first set of features that should ultimately lead us to this target operating mode. This functionality should therefore be available in an upcoming release. Before the end of 2016 perhaps?

But what does this first “building block” actually consist of? With this release, Anaplan provides you with three new features:

• The first feature: “Mark a list as Production Data” now allows you to distinguish between a configuration-type list that should be managed in a development environment and a reference-type list that can be maintained directly in the production environment. In an upcoming release, Anaplan will allow you to synchronize your model’s configuration structure between the development and production environments without impacting production data. In short, you will have the ability to transport lists identified as configuration without impacting those maintained directly in production. However, be careful with these lists maintained in production, as the items in these lists cannot be called in module formulas. For the moment, Anaplan does not provide clarification regarding the use of properties of this type of list in module formulas (to be confirmed in practice).

• The second feature “Take Models Offline” is, as its name suggests, the addition of an Offline mode in the model management console. This Offline mode will allow you to easily block access to your model when performing maintenance operations on your model’s structure. The model remains, of course, completely accessible to Workspace Administrators.
  From now on, “An ‘active’ model is one that is not locked nor archived”!

• The third concerns improved connectivity between Workspaces of the same client. Until now, you could easily set up data imports between two models within the same Workspace via the data import feature. But this feature did not offer import from a model in another Workspace. Well, now it’s possible with this new release. You will therefore be able to import data from all the models you have access to. This includes imports (or links) from lists, modules, or views. Beyond the obvious fluidity provided by this inter-workspace connectivity, what you need to remember about this feature is that it increases Anaplan’s ability to adapt to your company structure. Indeed, this feature provides a concrete solution to application segregation needs, whether by geographic area or by business function. Without regression on the data exchange and synchronization capabilities already offered.

As in every release, there are also improvements that enhance the user experience of Anaplaners through small touches. Anaplan takes into account feedback from users and Anaplaners. This deserves to be highlighted!

 “Conditional Formatting Enhancements”

Greater flexibility in managing conditional formatting of your tables. No more need to go through your module and republish your view to modify the conditional formatting of your tables. You can now do it directly from your dashboard. The conditional formatting of your dashboards can now be completely independent of those used in modules. If you have multiple tables based on the same module in your dashboard, you can apply different conditional formatting to them.

“Dynamic Chart Selection”

Anyone who hasn’t been frustrated by charts that didn’t automatically update in their Dashboards, raise your hand! A new client? And off you had to go to your module to regenerate the chart to reimport it into your revenue-by-client tracking Dashboard…

Well, great news! With this new release, it’s over—from now on, charts will automatically update in your Dashboards, and that, even if it may seem trivial to some, for the Anaplan user that I am, is great news!

“Dashboard Designer Usability Enhancements”

Anaplan has listened to user feedback and offers navigation improvements for its dashboard design feature. In brief: hide the properties panel in design mode, save and exit design mode in a single action, save in “run time” mode, hide the Open source Module option for tables.

“New Funnel Chart”

A new chart for visualizing the sales pipeline by completion stage (consultation, prospect, qualified, negotiation, prototype, …).

“Map Chart Enhancements”

New country maps are available for your geographic area analyses (Australia, New Zealand, France).

And of course, as in every release, there are plenty of new Apps to discover on the Anaplan App Hub: https://apphub.anaplan.com.

In conclusion, this release provides the first building blocks for real changes highly anticipated by the Anaplaners community (environment management and centralized user management). However, we are still waiting for the internal chat feature that was announced at Anaplan Hub 2015 and that would bring a real collaborative touch to the product. A feature that could be accompanied by a space for managing a collaborative document repository or a partnership with an online document management platform (Drive for example…).

In terms of user experience, this release significantly improves the dashboard creation feature by correcting certain negative points from the previous version. We are now eagerly awaiting the feature that will allow multiple selections in dropdown menus on list items (particularly period and version) in table headers.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you need clarification or if you have questions about this new release jsaccona@meltone.com 

MeltOne Advisory, Anaplan’s Partner.