ThoughtSpot One — My first impression
I have been associated with ThoughtSpot since the beginning of 2018 where I started working on implementing Search based analytics for one of the retail clients in my company. Way back then it was ThoughtSpot 5.2. Since then I have worked across various version upgrades of ThoughtSpot and I am currently working on ThoughtSpot 6.3.
Last week I attended Beyond 2020 event organized by ThoughtSpot where they introduced “ThoughtSpot One”. I am very much impressed by the design and usability of this version and also the new features and the enhancement to the existing functionalities is just awesome.
In the following sections, I will be highlighting some of these new features and enhancements which are very captivating for me as a ThoughtSpot Analyst and Developer. I am sure this will make any developer’s life much easier.
- New Look and Usability experience
ThoughtSpot One introduces a new personalized home page for each user which is very user friendly. Once you get onboard you will be provided with an awesome user experience to get an access to some of the key Pinboards and Answers of your interest, you can choose to follow some of the KPIs which are of your interest and you can also follow the existing users of your interest so that you don't miss any of their crucial analysis which might be useful for you. All in all, the homepage provides the users with a very smooth experience which is as simple as using your favorite music app where you follow the musicians and artists of your interest.
2. Enhanced Search experience
The Search in ThoughtSpot gets more powerful with ThoughtSpot One. Unlike the previous versions where you could search your chosen data source, with ThoughtSpot One you take your search power to next level where you can even search for your results in the existing Answers and Pinboards which your team members or colleagues might have already developed. For example, if you are looking for a Sales KPI, before you search for the answer from the database, you can search it in the existing Answers and Pinboard library where your colleague might have already developed an awesome analysis around Sales KPI which you could use. ThoughtSpot One comes with a simple toggle switch on your search bar where you can switch the source of your search.
3. Search Assistance
To help the user training needs, one of the options which I used to recommend to my new users in the previous versions of ThoughtSpot was to use the “Replay Search” feature which can be found in the saved answers. To extend the user training capabilities, ThoughtSpot One comes equipped with Search Assistance. With Search Assistance you basically create your sample search and have this saved. These saved results gets added to the new “Search Assistance” section in the Data Tab which can be used by the new users to understand and learn how the search can be used.
4. Introducing TML (ThoughtSpot Modelling Language)
ThoughtSpot One introduces TML (ThoughtSpot Modelling Language) which offers great flexibility and options to tweak and update your pinboards and answers programmatically. Additionally, with TML we can now easily migrate the Pinboards and worksheets from one instance to another by simply exporting them into .tml file and importing them in the target instance with just a click of button. This feature is going to help me a lot as a developer as the previous versions of ThoughtSpot had only worksheet migration capability and I had to re-create all my pinboards again in the target instance if I had to migrate them.
5. SpotApps
SpotApps is another new capability introduced in ThoughtSpot One. SpotApps leverages the TML capabilities and it particularly captured my attention because this offers packaging a particular set of Pinboards and associated data objects into a single .zip file which can be migrated to any instance. This capability will be very helpful in managing multiple applications and projects in ThoughtSpot across an organization.
6. Pinboard Filter made easy
Another simple yet very helpful upgrade in ThoughtSpot One is having an option to include or exclude any particular visualization(s) from the pinboard level filters. We had to create multiple copied of worksheet in order to accomplish this functionality in the previous versions of ThoughtSpot.
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