Redesign the Analytics Experience with Curator

Okay. We're going to go ahead and get started. Thanks everyone for being here. We're here to talk about redesigning the analytics experience with Curator. Curator is our tool for embedding analytics, and it comes from InterWorks' deep experience with helping companies around the world make analytics more impactful. So we do that in all kinds of ways across the entire stack, helping them make sure their data is in the right shape, that they have the right strategy in place, that they are enabling their people through training and upskilling their staff with the right tools and knowledge so they can make the most of their analytics. But one thing that we've found is that there's a need for a presentation layer. Many of our analytic tools do a great job of allowing us to grab our data, turn it into something useful, and create this beautiful experience around dashboarding. But we don't really have any tools around shaping the experience of finding and sharing those dashboards. And so that's where Curator exists. Curator exists to help frame your content, allow you to bring your brand to it, and customize that user experience so you meet your users where they're at and make it more impactful, increasing user adoption, and making analytics more effective. And if you think about it, the common state of analytics is kind of like garage sale shopping. It's disorganized, it's a mess. There are treasures out there, and this is the sort of thing that can be exciting on a Saturday as a hobby when we want to have some fun and it's a leisurely exploring of all the content. But this is less exciting when you're on deadline and you need the data now to make a data-driven decision. So finding the insight across all our reports, all our servers, across all our platforms can be very difficult. And that's because presentation matters. There's a big difference and a big contrast between garage sale shopping versus going to the Apple Store where things are curated. They have a select few options. They're well organized. You know where to go in the store to get what you need. And the whole presentation is elevated. Right? It feels good. And that's the sort of thing that leads Apple to have year after year the highest revenue per square foot in their stores. It's an experience that people want to go to, want to do. And, you know, if they need something quick, they can go in and grab something quickly and know exactly where to go and who to get help from and all those things. And so Curator exists to bring that sort of experience to your analytics, to take that dashboard that you poured your hard work into, to take it from an unsung, undiscovered treasure to something that's a cult classic. It found its following. It's something people are excited about and want to return to again and again. So Curator helps your dashboards find their audience. So let's talk about some of the ways that Curator does that. First, it helps you brand your analytics. It also then allows you to customize that user experience around your analytics. And finally, it helps you unify all those analytics into a single, unified, consistent experience. So over the next several minutes, this is what we're going to drill down into, is each of these and some of the features that relate so you can get an idea of how we can help you improve the adoption of your analytics and the experience around them. So let's kick it off with talking about branding. So Curator exists initially just to help people white label their analytics. They didn't want their analytics to look like whatever vendor they had selected. Some of those platforms can be fairly utilitarian. And it doesn't really kind of show the level of effort that they're putting into their analytics. And so Curator is built with easy-to-use tools that don't require any kind of web developer knowledge, something that business users can do to make it so that you can brand your analytics and really customize that look and feel. So this is something that you can do lots of things with. So you can take a site and make it a dark theme, make it a light theme, and those are things that you can bring at the touch of a button. But you can also bring it to every user and we can customize their experience based on their user groups. And so we can do things like change the logo. So in the top left corner here, you can see we have this site changing from an InterWorks logo to a Curator logo based on that group we're choosing. And so you could do this across different departments, different key users, different companies, your external vendors, and it allows you to bring a white-labeled experience to lots of different groups. And that overridability doesn't just stop at styling. You can really tailor this experience to your users. So your executives could come in and get their KPI dashboard, their select few dashboards that they have to see every day. And then for marketing, maybe we change it up and they have a slightly different dashboard, different set of views and dashboards available to them. Then we could also have a general place. Maybe this is for our vendors or maybe this is for the rest of our employees, and they could have a landing page that helps them go into different content, explore the different menus. But we can really, again, target that experience and have very different looks, feels, and controls available to each user group. And, again, like I said earlier, this is all in an easy-to-use, no-code environment. So our back end makes it easy for you to drag and drop in a logo, change a color, and then you can just save that to the group that it applies to. And so creating these experiences take just minutes, and you can really tailor it to your heart's content. So that's what branding looks like in Curator. Let's look at what customizing the analytic experience looks like within Curator. So the reason we care about customizing the experience is because good isn't enough. That dashboard that you spent all that time on is going to waste because the experience is just difficult. Users expect more with the ease of use of apps and websites increasing every year. People expect that things be very usable, very easy to engage with. They expect that content to be relevant to them, tied to their interests. They expect that it's going to be a personalized experience. And all these things feed into their judgment of whether the information they're seeing is credible. So if someone comes in and they see lots of things that aren't relevant to them, the content is not very good looking, it's conflicting with lots of different styles and color usage, they're going to not trust it as much, just inherently. And so these things happen just in a blink of an eye. It's not something that a user's necessarily thinking about, but all these things go into having impacts on their actions. And so it's really important that you create an environment that looks cohesive and is a good, joyful experience for them because they will then engage with it more often and trust it. So let's talk about some of those ways that you can customize the experience within Curator. So first, the navigation, something you get complete control over. So you can change the style, you can add icons, you can have dashboards show up in multiple places in the hierarchy without duplicating that content. You can really control exactly how it is all organized. You can change the style of it. We can have a top nav and dropdown menus, and those can be multiple layers. You can use things like a landing page to help enter people into an experience. You can use your dashboards to extend the navigation further. And so within Curator, you can really create this very custom experience that allows users to drill down in lots of ways and reveal more and more information as they go down. And all the menus in the navigation are, again, easy-to-use, no-code experiences. It's just drag and drop. You can reorganize that, change the hierarchy, change how many levels you have displayed, really easy. And all those things are created very simply in easy-to-use menus. Of course, part of the big experience that I highlighted is that experience of building a landing page, adding your content. And so that's where our page builder comes in. This really gives you the ability to build out custom homepages, landing pages, tell data stories, and do anything that might involve mixing text, images, dashboards and reports, navigation buttons. We do that, again, in a no-code experience. It's something that you can come in, select your layout, add it where you want the content to go, then easily select a file to add or a report to add and build out that page. So this is something that makes it so that web development is available to people without web development backgrounds. And as people enter into an experience, whether it's a page or a dashboard or an instance, they might need some additional guidance. And so we have features like tutorials and notifications to allow you to guide your users further and give them information that would be relevant to them. So our tutorial feature is actually really powerful. It can be multiple pages. It can highlight pieces of images. So you can really zero in on pieces of a dashboard to give specific guidance, give them background information about the data or how to use that chart. Or if you have some complex controls, we can ease that user experience and make it something that they are guided through and have more information. All the tutorials can also have images, GIFs, and videos embedded in them as well, so you can take this even further. My favorite customer story is actually a customer who decided that they were going to have the analysts record a video explaining the dashboard. And they would go through and kind of explain what questions they were answering, who the audience was, what data they used, what any limitations that they should know of. And it was a way both to make those dashboards more approachable, but to get people to know their analytics team. I thought that was a really novel and neat approach to take. And then finally, in customizing the experience, we actually bring that ability to your end users. And so with features like Report Builder for Tableau, your users who are consuming reports can go through and build their own reports right there in the browser. They can select the view that they're doing, save it, add some comments, upload some additional images, and really build out an entire PowerPoint presentation with cover slides, end slides, all done in your corporate template if that's something you desire. And these things can be downloaded into PDF, PowerPoint, and scheduled so you can send it on a recurring basis with updated data for the view they selected. So it's a very powerful tool for bringing out reports to people who may not have access to these servers, may not have access to Curator, or just to help your users build out their analysis and for them to tell their data stories as they piece together the content that already exists in your company. Okay. So we've talked about brand. We've talked about customizing the analytics experience. Now let's talk about unifying your experience with analytics. So kind of harkening back to that garage sale experience. A lot of the experience of going onto a Tableau server or any analytics server can be one of sorting through tons and tons of content. And that's just if you have access to a single site. I've seen servers across the world. This is something that they all run into. But most people have access to more than a single site on Tableau Server or another thing. They may have multiple sites. They may have multiple servers. They may have multiple platforms that they use. And so finding out where that information is can be very hard. And so Curator is a way to unify that, to reduce the noise, curate the content, so select the things that actually matter. If they show up in the Curator website, then it's something that matters to you and your company. And then to make it so that they don't have to go to multiple places, that there's one single place for analytics to exist. So we do that through our integrations. Curator does integrate with Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and Power BI on the content level. That means we're aware of the security. We adapt the experience based on the security you already set up in these tools. So if a user has access to a report in one of these tools, they can see it in Tableau. If they don't, they won't see it in Curator and the menus and landing pages will adapt to that so that they don't accidentally click on something and get a "you do not have access to this" message. They get a curated experience again where the things that are relevant to them show up. We do that based on the work you've already put into your platforms. Now we do have additional integrations that are a little less deep, but allow you to bring in those legacy systems or complementary systems as needed. So you can bring in things like an SSRS report or connect to Box and link out to relevant files where maybe they're PowerPoints or CSVs or other things like that. You can bring in media or YouTube videos. And we have generic embeds for lots of other things. Or you can bring in any platform that allows embedding through our generic embed. So you can really do a lot to bring together all the tools, even outside of analytics, into one place so that users get the best experience possible. And one of the reasons this is important is not just a single home for your analytics, but also leveraging the best of your tools, right? The best of breed that is the reason you probably selected some of these tools. So in the example you're seeing on the screen, we have a Tableau dashboard at the top where we're using Tableau for creating that great experience. We're allowed to drill down into that dashboard, get some additional things. But then we can use ThoughtSpot to do some additional search on that same dataset. So we're enabling two different types of experiences with two different tools in a single page within Curator. These things, of course, can go to lots of different applications. And of course, we could add text and images to tell additional data stories, provide additional instructions to the users, and all of that would be really easy to do. And then with Curator Enterprise—anyone else having trouble with audio? I just saw a message that someone can't hear anything. I just want to make sure we're—Okay, cool. Other people can hear me. Cool. Thank you for confirming. Okay. So Curator Enterprise is one of our—We have two editions of Curator. We have Curator Standard and Curator Enterprise. Curator Enterprise exists to help extend analytics across an entire organization and across the globe. And so one of those features that is central to that is central dispatch, which allows us to create self-governed sites so you can have multiple Curator instances. And the admins of each of those sites can decide what content belongs, how it's organized, but it can all then be accessible in a central place, that parent instance. And so one organization could have a central analytics hub where everything that a user has access to is available, but then drill down into a sales site or an APAC site or an executive site or a site for their vendors. And so you could really mix and match internal and external audiences, different companies, and things like that. It's a really, really powerful tool for extending that Curator experience. Now, I do want to underline that each individual Curator instance can do overrides for groups. So you can actually have some of these experiences in a single instance. This is much more about self-governance, allowing different groups to have access to customize the experience further. And like I said, we have an Enterprise Edition. All of Curator is easy to deploy and enterprise ready. We use SSO, we have two-factor authentication, high availability is available. Those things are built to scale. And we have very, very large instances running of Curator supporting tens of thousands of users and more. And we have enterprise-level support. So when you buy our Enterprise Edition, you get a priority queue, a dedicated account team, and we'll review your deployment with you to see if there's any additional features you can use, help guide your continued development of Curator, and hear your feedback so we can bring that into our roadmap and continue to make a better tool for you. Curator, again, doesn't require any coding. Coding is an optional thing you can do. So if you do have web developers, that is something you can bring into the tool and extend a bit further if you want to. This is really good for creating custom tools on a single webpage. So if you wanted to bring in a D3 visualization or create an interactive form, you could do that and Curator would support that, but it's not required and we give you lots of tools to do data write-back and things like that right in the tool. And it's easy to launch in under a week. So you can go from idea to launch incredibly quickly in Curator. It's very easy to use and you have our team of experts there to guide you. So with that, we are going to open up to questions and we can even go out to live demos or anything like that if people have interests. I should also say our host is Derek Austin, is the head of our platform team. So if you have any questions around Curator as a software product, any deep questions about security or scalability or anything like that, he is a great person to have online. Hey, Derek. I saw you answered a question about integrating with Alteryx and Python. So I'll go ahead and expound upon that. So with Alteryx, we don't have a content-level integration where we're aware of the security and things like that. But you can definitely embed things like Alteryx's apps into Curator. You could use Curator as a way to kind of get into some of the tools that you built with Alteryx. And then as Derek mentioned, we have an integrations area where you could kick off Alteryx workflows or Python workflows and things like that. So depending on what you want to do, there's definitely a lot that you can do with Curator and other tools like that. Oh, Julian has a question about whether we rely on Tableau row-level security for content filtering by audience. So there's kind of two levels to filtering by audience. First there is, does this dashboard show up? And in that case, no, we're not dependent on row-level security. So there is Curator-based security where you could limit access within Curator itself. We do, by default, look at what people have access to in Tableau, the access they have to content. But yes, if you then want to have data security where multiple users can have access to the same dashboard, but they get a different experience within that dashboard, that's where, yes, we would rely on Tableau row-level security because we're just telling Tableau, hey, this is the user that is viewing this report, and Tableau is giving back the proper report. So if you want kind of data security there, you would need to have that in place. Ben, there's also a question Marshall asked, is there any capacity constraints on the number of users? And I'll go ahead and take that one. The short answer, Marshall, is no, there's not. The licensing for Tableau or ThoughtSpot or whatever your underlying system is will still come into play. So you have to have licenses on those systems for your users, but in Curator there's no user licensing. It's just a flat fee. And as far as like server capacity, Curator is pretty lightweight. And so the cap on users is just based on how big of a server you want to put at it. We have some clients that have thousands of users on their systems and really they're not using a ton of hardware to run Curator. Curator is pretty lightweight. The underlying systems like Tableau or ThoughtSpot or whatever you're using are actually doing a lot more of the data crunching. They're still building out the visualizations and that type of stuff. And so that's where the bulk of your hardware is going to be. Curator, again, pretty lightweight. So you can usually get by with a fairly lightweight system to actually run it itself, but the only capacities would be hardware related. Derek, you also might want to take this question for authentication security, specifically they're asking about Active Directory. Yeah, absolutely. So Curator can use Tableau directly for authentication. It can also use, if Tableau is set up to use Active Directory on the backend, it can use Tableau as a step to that. We can actually use Active Directory directly ourselves in Curator. You can also tie into SAML. Most people are using Azure AD if they're using Active Directory these days. And so we have a lot of clients that tie into that, or if you have some kind of SSO system like Okta or even OpenID type setups, we can tie into those as well. Yeah. So I think an important thing there is basically if Tableau supports it, we support it and we'd be happy to consult you on kind of the best way to go about that. Curator is used in high-security industries, places that need to be HIPAA compliant. So we check all the boxes there and could definitely talk you through your specific requirements and needs. Okay, Julian asked if filtered access is usually based on Tableau security. That's what most of our customers do because it's already been set up. So part of the philosophy with Curator is to use what's already there whenever possible. And so if you go in and batch import a bunch of Tableau reports, you've selected the ones you want to show there. We want to make it easy so that the security is already in place and ready to go. Now you can use Curator security as well, and we can add things to files and navigation within Curator so that you have additional security there. But yes, a lot of times people are using the content security setup in Tableau already for what they're using in Curator. Okay. So we have a question about Page Builder and why it's kind of a customer favorite. So Page Builder is something we spent a lot of time on, especially this last year. It's always been there to make building pages easier and to be able to mix and match content. But over time, there has been a lot of need for more control over the style of a page, added padding, having content sit side by side, more dynamic layouts, all those kinds of things. And so we continue to invest in Page Builder to make that more powerful. And so now you can create an experience that has buttons that guide people through navigation, have a video, have a dashboard altogether, have a place to enter data, and you can put it all together in minutes. So, I mean, just as an example, if a customer asks for a trial or if you ask for a trial and you want it to look like your company, I'll go take some assets off your website and build something that looks a little bit like your company within thirty minutes or an hour to give you a rough idea of what it could look like and tailored to you. So Page Builder enables those experiences, something that web developers normally would be doing. We wanted to bring that to a larger audience, especially since Tableau users are used to having control over their dashboards. So we're using a lot of those same ideas. Julian asked about our commercial model. Pricing, it's flat. Our Standard Edition is twenty thousand dollars per year. Our Enterprise Edition is fifty thousand dollars per year. And it's all as many users as you want to bring. The limitation on Standard is just that it's one integration. So you pick one tool, whether that's ThoughtSpot, Power BI, Tableau, you have that kind of single experience in our deep integrations. Though you can still embed things like YouTube, Box, SSRS, all those things are a little bit more manual. And then our Enterprise Edition is everything. So you get all of the integrations we have, Central Dispatch, our translation tool. So, yeah, you can make some of the menu items and system controls specific to a region and that higher level of support as well. Oh, okay. So Marshall's asking about the embedded SKU for Tableau. Tableau does have an embedded SKU and it's actually a discount model. So it is more or less the same tool that you know and love with Tableau, but it is a discount for delivering reports to people external to your company. So it's not an option for internal uses of Tableau and Curator, but if you are doing something like for your vendors, your customers, you're making a data product, the embedded SKU is a fantastic option and it'll save you money. Other tools like ThoughtSpot have ThoughtSpot Everywhere, so that concept exists. But with ThoughtSpot Everywhere, it's actually something that you pay additional for the access to that JavaScript. Same thing with Power BI. You actually have to have the higher-level SKU to have access to their JavaScript API. So there'll be some limitations on Power BI depending on what SKU you are in. So definitely a good question. If you have more detailed questions about platforms and their different SKUs and how that may or may not affect embedded, definitely reach out to us. With the SSRS integration, can you create a subscription with the Curator UI? So that's a good example of something where we could help you create that subscription. We would need to do some JavaScript, I think, with SSRS to be able to get that. But I will say with many of the tools, you can expose a toolbar to support the features that they support internally. Tableau has this, Power BI has this, but other tools that we don't have integrations for also have their own little toolbar that shows up in embedded scenarios. So I don't know specifically for SSRS. That's definitely something we could look into. But if it is, you should be able to still access that content while in Curator so that you're not kind of losing any capability there. Any other questions or things we missed? All right. It seems like we might've got them all. So thanks everyone for attending the webinar. There will be a recording posted. You should see it in your email inbox in the next couple of days. You'll also be able to find that on the interworks.com website. If you do have any more questions, feel free to reach out. You're at our Curator website or via contact us form on the InterWorks website. Also, if you could, we would love to have your feedback on this webinar and you can do that by clicking the Typeform link in the webinar chat. Thanks for attending, and we'd love to hear more from you.