Welcome lucky newcomer! So you’re taking this over from a departing colleague, or roles and responsibilities shifted unexpectedly—this can be alarming! But no need to fear, Sisense is built to be user friendly, and we’re here to help even if you missed out on your team’s initial training.
The beauty of Sisense is how quickly you can get up to speed and pump out interactive dashboards working with different data sources. There is a learning curve, but regardless of if you have no experience with a BI tool or worked with other BI tools, with some effort it can be a very powerful solution and I hope you come to appreciate it.
To get started, we should go over these topics:
POINT OF CONTACT (REACH OUT TO YOUR CSM)
If you are a client/partner of ours you will have received a dedicated customer success manager. You should definitely reach out and let them know that you will be the contact moving forward. They are a resource to use, and can help with escalating issues, setting up trainings, licensing, and working with you on your project to ensure that the dashboards can be leveraged! It is also highly encouraged to speak with others within our organization, as we are always striving to better assist, which may come down to meetings with members from our product or management team. Hopefully, you will be satisfied with our service and can even write an on-line review!
TRAINING (ASK FOR TRAINING IF YOU NEED)
We have an updated training exercise that will help you become more familiarized with the product, and is also a pre-requisite for what we call a re-engagement process, or a training on a specific goal. We don’t believe in theoretical trainings (although nice in theory), and would like to use an actual project or goal to work on as training for yourself and your team so that it is better ingrained. Typically it is 3 to 4 hours in length over multiple sessions, if you need more time or taking upon a larger task, it will come at a cost, so please speak with your CSM. Follow this link to start the exercise:
LICENSING (REVIEW WITH YOUR CSM)
It would not be a bad idea to understand licensing. To keep it simple and not go over the advanced features (high availability, remote access, long index, elasticube as a datasource) lets focus on the two areas, server licenses and users. Sisense must be installed on a server preferably without other services running on this server. When you install Sisense, primarily two components are installed called the Elasticube Manager and the Web Server. Please keep in mind because of this, there are two passwords that are not in sync; one is for your support tickets under the package owner and the activation of Sisense (or the wonderful countdown to when it expires) and for the dashboards itself. Here is the screenshot of what the login looks like for Sisense activation/Sisense installation (You can simply open the Sisense Activation application that you can find under applications or open the Elasticube Manager >> click on Help & How To’s in the upper right hand corner >>My Account:
Here is the screenshot for logging into the dashboard:
It is recommended you go over changing owners, emails, passwords with your CSM, but for further information, please look at this FAQ:
In versions prior to version 7.0, you have administrators, designers, and viewers. Administrators are meant to work with the data security, API, and other aspects of administration, while the designer can edit and create dashboards. The viewer will only be able to view, filter, and drill into the dashboards, along with all of them being able to receive e-mails or export to PDF/png/excel where applicable.
For version 7.0, we added two other users for our browser-based elasticube manager, the data modeler and the data designer; think of them as an extension to the administrator and designer respectively.
SUPPORT (HOW TO WORK WITH OUR SUPPORT TEAM)
Working with CSMs and our support team will be crucial to your success, so understanding how to work with them will help you and help them better help you! When opening a support ticket, please include as much information as you can along with screenshots and the version of Sisense you are using (You can open the Elasticube Manager >> go to Help & How To’s in the upper right hand corner >> About OR you can go to the dashboard and click on the person icon on the upper right hand corner:
Also, a personal request from myself, please do not open a ticket with a blanket statement like “SISENSE DOES NOT WORK” without any further information. Our support team will have no choice but to kindly pummel you with a barrage of questions in order to troubleshoot, and it will save valuable time if you provide as much detail as possible from the start. Their first response will always be the quickest so it will definitely help you come to a quicker resolution. If it is a high priority issue, please also escalate to your CSM.
Also, for our support team to focus and be able to provide the best possible service, we strongly recommend submitting different tickets on separate topics.
