Introducing the Rapid Insight Collaborative Cloud

With the new version 4.1 of Veera comes the Rapid Insight Collaborative Cloud. The Collaborative Cloud allows Veera users to share and collaborate on any analytic processes that they develop; these processes can be utilized, discussed, and enhanced by anyone in the RI user community. We hope that the cloud will increase efficiency by allowing users to share resources and ideas in real time and draw upon the knowledge of their peers whenever they begin a new analytic challenge.

Accessing the Cloud
To access the Collaborative Cloud, click on ‘RI CC’ on the title bar and select “Browse RI Collaborative Cloud” as shown: 

Downloading from the Cloud

Once in the cloud, you have the ability to search for Veera jobs, transform operations, and chart styles to download.  You can choose to search these by contributor. You also have the ability to order search results by contribution date or type, number of downloads, number of comments, name, date modified, or contributor.

To get details on an item or select an item to download, simply double-click on its title. To view or leave comments, double-click on the “# Comments’ field.

If you choose to download a transform operation or chart style, Veera will direct you to save to a folder outside of the Veera program, similar to the way you would save any outputs from Veera jobs. If you choose to download a job from the Collaborative Cloud, Veera will place that job in an automatically created folder titled ‘From RI Collaborative Cloud’, which you’ll see along with your other folders in the Workspace tab:

You can access any of the jobs you download from the cloud by navigating to this folder. 

Uploading to the Cloud
Right-click on the item to be uploaded (job, transform, chart style, or add-in) and select “Contribute [item type] to RI Collaborative Cloud”. Once selected, the Contribute to Rapid Insight Collaborative Cloud window will open with the original name of the item entered already at the top. 

Before submitting by clicking “Contribute”, the user must enter a unique name, a description of the item, and check the Terms & Conditions box before the item can be contributed. Additional files (like related sample data) can also be contributed as part of the submission.

Other Ways to Download
You can quickly download jobs from the Collaborative Cloud by right-clicking in the “Jobs” area of the Workspace tab and selecting “Get Job from RI Collaborative Cloud”:

You can also import transforms from within a Transform node. To do so, right-click on the white area in the “Transform Operations” window at the bottom of the screen and select ‘Get transform from RI Collaborative Cloud”.

To import a chart style from within the Chart Data node, click on the ellipsis to the right of the “Chart Style” drop-down menu. In that window, right-click and select “Get style from RI Collaborative Cloud” as shown below. 

-Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight

User Conference Recap

It's been one week since our User Conference wrapped up, and we're happy to say that we set a new attendance record with this one. Thank you to all who attended, and for those who were not able to attend, here's what you missed: We had some great presentations from customers and staff alike on topics such as "Effective Assessment and Accreditation Using Veera", "Dealing with Common Modeling Issues", "Using Veer to Compile Survey Data from Multiple Sources", "Pivoting Away from Excel", "Predictive Modeling as Proactive Retention Strategy", and "Automating IPEDS". Thanks again to all who presented.  Some of the feedback we got indicated that our customers would like more opportunities to talk to one another and exchange ideas and feedback concerning projects they're working on. We agree! To that end, we've set up a few networking groups on LinkedIn organized by subject to facilitate those exchanges. The direct links to these networks, by department, are: Fundraising and Advancement Network Institutional Research Network Strategic Enrollment Management Network We got a lot of feedback about things that we can add to our products to make them work better for you. If you have anything to add - suggestions, enhancements, or things we can be doing better - please email me and I'll make sure your ideas get to the right person.  At the end of the conference, Mike Laracy, our Founder, President, and CEO, talked a little bit about product enhancements and changes on the horizon. We will be detailing these more as they come out on our blog, but here are some of the most important changes: We'll be adding a conditional stop in Veera so that you can choose to stop a job based on a condition you set (for example, if you don't find any matches in a merge). You'll be able to un-dock data views and individual jobs in Veera so that you can work on dual screens and easily see both your data and jobs at the same time. We'll be adding in a 'Variable Reduction' feature, which will filter your variable set down to just those variables which are predictive (similar to the Automated Mining tab in Analytics). This allows you to focus on a smaller dataset consisting of predictive variables only.  We saved the best for last: one of the things we're most excited about is a users-only Veera Collaborative Cloud. Our users will be able to share jobs with each other by saving and downloading them to and from the cloud. So, if you have a report that you think other institutions would benefit from using, you'll be able to upload that report to share with them. Similarly, if there's a particular report or output that you're hoping to achieve, before creating it by hand, you can see if anyone else has already created a similar job. We hope that the Collaborative Cloud will allow all of our customers to be as efficient as possible, and that the exchange of ideas will compound the speed of growth for all of the institutions we work with.  -Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight