As we dive into 2019, we’d like to tell you about one of the Composable team’s proudest accomplishments from the last year — the launch of Composable Enterprise 2.0.
In 2018, we dramatically overhauled the user experience of Composable’s web application frontend. The changes made it easier than ever to navigate the platform, create workflows for your organization’s critical data streams, and share tools with colleagues and coworkers.
Let’s walk through some of the key improvements you can explore right now on our free cloud instance.
New Navigation
Getting around inside Composable has never been faster. You’ll notice a new sidebar to the left of each page. There, you’ll find contextual links for the DataFlow, QueryView, or any other resource you’re viewing. Using these links, you can quickly manage, share, or build on your resources without hunting around to find the right page for each activity.
Done with your current task? The sidebar has quick links to all of Composable’s product areas so you can jump straight to creating a new Key, DataFlow, or Group.
Last, we have my personal favorite, our global search widget, now relocated to the top of the sidebar. This is the fastest way to find anything inside Composable. Type a quick word or use our powerful search grammar to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for.
With navigation moved to the sidebar, we now have a more flexible, less cluttered top bar across each page in Composable. See it in action, displaying the name of the current resource and providing visual cues like an execution progress bar for DataFlows. We’ll also be beefing up both the side and top bars in coming months to help you get an even better sense of how Composable is being used in your organization.
Fresh Look & Feel
Our updated navigation was a key area of improvement, but the improvements didn’t stop there. Every page of the platform has been redesigned: some rewritten from the ground up to work better for your use case, others given a new coat of paint for more pleasant reading, clicking, and presentation. Take a look around and you’ll notice how much of an improvement we’ve made. Pages are organized logically, information and controls are easy to find and use, layouts are responsive down to the smallest desktop screen sizes, colors are thematic, tables scale to millions of rows, actions have obvious and visual consequences, and pesky bugs have been squashed for good. We’re proud of these enhancements, and we think you’ll appreciate their positive impact on your workflow as much as we have.
Some of the highlights:
- We’ve rethought exploration in our DataFlow Designer, adding a navigation panel with powerful zoom & pan controls, a spotlighting feature when reviewing performance metrics after a run, and some awesome tweaks to make module discovery much quicker.
- Looking to understand a DataFlow, not necessarily modify it? We’ve added a new default view when opening a dataflow. You’ll see the DataFlow’s modules, their configuration, and how things are hooked up, without needing to dive into the complexity of the full DataFlow.
- The classic grid view of each resource’s Share Page has been replaced with a card-based view that makes it easier than ever to see at a glance what kinds of access a given user or group has on your resource.
- The QueryView editor has a beautiful, full-screen design that puts your query code front-and-center, with inputs, settings, and connection information stashed in quickly-accessible side drawers.
- Folders, a great tool for organizing resources and the user who can access them, have been given a retooling. Each folder now has a dedicated page which allows for more straightforward management both of the folder’s contents and the folder itself.
- Brand new designs have been deployed for user profiles, the DataExplorer, Groups, the administrator console, and more.
Our Roadmap
The 2.0 release was just the start of our efforts to innovate on the user experience that exposes the powerful functions of our revolutionary DataOps platform. This update is a major step forward, both visually and technologically, and it’s already allowing us to deliver some long-planned interface features. We’ll be shipping even more usability improvements, customization options, and, of course, core platform features in 2019. It’s a very exciting time for the whole Composable team, and we’re excited to share all of it with you over the next year.
Notes for Existing Users
- Organizations using a custom logo image will need to reconfigure that particular customization, as the new sidebar utilizes two separate image files for the expanded and collapsed display modes.
- Version 2.0.0 officially drops support for versions of Internet Explorer that are now unsupported by Microsoft. Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7 or higher remains supported. We don’t maintain support tables for Evergreen browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, but Composable runs well in all of them.
Renamed Product Areas
You may notice that some of the product areas you’ve used in the past are nowhere to be found. Not to worry; we’ve simply renamed some product areas in this major version release.
| Old Branding | New Branding |
|---|---|
| Forms | DataPortals |
| Properties | Keys |
| Interfaces | WebApps |
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