| Announced on |
| July 25, 2023 |
We’re thrilled to share some exciting changes regarding how you build, share, and interact with dashboards in Explore.
As of today, 61% of dashboards are created using the beta dashboard builder, and many of you have shared your appreciation for how the new experience has made creating and managing dashboards easier.
We’re now focusing on closing feature gaps in the beta experience over the coming months. We want to ensure the transition away from the classic builder is as seamless as possible for you.
While we’re still defining the date for the general availability (GA) release of the beta dashboard builder, we want to share the steps we’ll be taking to gradually introduce the beta builder and deprecate the classic one.
The chart below summarizes the dashboard transition plan:
The detailed transition plan is as follows:
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Phase 1: Beta dashboard builder GA release (4 months): The GA release of our new dashboard builder will include a host of exciting features like tabs, exports, schedules, and the ability to link filters across different datasets.
During this phase, you’ll still have the option to continue creating dashboards with the classic dashboard builder. However, there will be some downsides to continuing to use the classic builder:- Only highly impactful bugs will be fixed in the classic builder
- No enhancements will be made to the classic builder
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Phase 2: Transitionary period (4 months): Following the GA release of the new dashboard builder, there will be a transitionary period of approximately four months.
During this time, you’ll still be able to edit your dashboards using the classic builder, but you won’t be able to create brand-new dashboards with it. This transitionary period will enable you to gradually adapt to the new interface and take advantage of its enhanced capabilities at your own pace.
At this stage, you’ll also know how your shared dashboards are being used and will be able to identify the relevant dashboards you want to rebuild using the new dashboard builder.
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Phase 3: View-only access to classic dashboards (4 months): After the transitionary period concludes, dashboards built with the classic builder will remain accessible to all users who have access, but the capabilities will be limited to view-only mode as edit access to the classic builder will be removed. View-only mode for dashboards built in the classic builder will remain in place for a further 4 months.
- Phase 4: Retirement of the classic view-only experience: In order to be transparent about our future plans, we want to inform you that 4 months after the “View-only access to classic dashboards” phase, we’ll fully retire the classic dashboard.
At the time of this announcement, you'll have more than a year to transition to the new dashboard-building experience. We know that over 70% of dashboard views happen within the first year of the creation of the dashboard. This data suggests that many of the dashboards built with the classic builder might be no longer used—and will therefore not need to be recreated—by the time we fully retire the classic experience.
We understand that change can be challenging, but we’re confident that the new dashboard builder will empower you to create even more insightful and visually stunning dashboards you will be proud to share.
We appreciate your ongoing support and want to assure you that our team will be available to assist you throughout the transition period. We recommend following this article to stay up to date on this plan.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to comment on this post.
39 Comments
So, to clarify, within 8-12 months, every dashboard that we currently use will need to be re-built? Is that correct? They won't be transitioned over to the new builder, even in some sort of ugly version?
Converter available....??
View-only access should be kept for longer unless there are easy migration tools for older dashboards.
Due to Explore not having an Import/Export functionality, building some dashboards would take multiple days, which is quite expensive. And we have many huge ones.
If we're forced to consider applying all that effort, the next best decision is to spend that time migrating all our Zendesk-based reporting away from Zendesk.
We have multiple client facing dashboards, is there a way to retain the link to the new dashboard for folks who have their dashboards bookmarked?
To date, this product does not meet our needs and development announcements have consistently declared that the new builder won't include business critical components of the existing builder. I do not feel comfortable assuming it will meet our needs and outlaying resources toward this product - we will likely need to transition to Power BI instead.
Similar to other SaaS products when a new format is released, is there any need to deprecate classic? In other words, could this be considered for a 'containment' stage.
Alternatively, is there any chance we could get more hands-on, one-on-one developer time to support the transition?
So far we do not use the new builder, because there are still functional gaps relevant for us (e.g. scheduling and exporting reports).
We have lots of dashboards, each for any product family we support. We want to show stakeholders only information relevant to them to keep the access easy and also for for data protection reasons. Rebuilding all these dashboards will create high efforts. Thus we have the same question as Terry.
Any idea, when the new dashboard builder will move to GA? Q4/2023 or later?
We missing a lot of things in the new builder:
- Bookmarks
- Multiple Tab Support (Color etc.)
- "Per Viewer" didn´t support Omni Channel Dataset
- Some Querys on the dashboard can´t update or should not update if i.e. a Group is changed, in Classic Dashboard you can freeze it.
- Export Limitations
- E-Mail and Scheduling Limitations
- Linking of dataset to each other Filter (we don´t want see 4x Assignee)
Is there a list of features which will for sure not come from Classic and face out?
Is this the announcement that is published that gives us over a year or will there be a more formal one that offers the tools and solutions to transfer over existing reports into the new builder? We would like exact timelines please
When does Phase 1 start? We would like to use the new dashboard builder, but we need to schedule dashboards.
Disappointing as we are still not seeing a decision on Bookmarks in the new builder. Without bookmarks, Explore Dashboards will be far more frustrating once the classic Dashboard is deprecated.
Please provide a tool to easily migrate current dashboards to the new dashboard.
And please make all the features that were available before available on the new dashboard.
Will Zendesk be responsible for the labor and cost of manually rebuilding each and every one of the large number of existing dashboards?
Please reconsider.
The BETA builder just isn't to par or even close to par in terms of its capability of reporting. It feels more of a variant than a full product itself. I use the BETA builder for customers who wish to present their dashboards on screens and TVs within their offices. However the classic builder I use to build reports for customers who intend on sharing these digitally or via email/print.
Hi,
I have seen a number of people in this thread mention missing features in the new builder - here is a link to the features that will be included GA and beyond: Comparing features available in the dashboard builder
From my perspective, the biggest missing features that won't or aren't confirmed to be available are:
I have not spent much time with the beta Builder, purely because of core missing features that I use frequently on Dashboards (bookmarks, hidden filters, scheduling, exporting, exclude filters).
I would love to know how exporting / scheduling will look in the new builder as well. I haven't seen any information on these features and if they will be at least equivalent to the already existing functionality or if they are to be improved (which would be great).
It's incredibly frustrating that there is no mention of tools to help move legacy Dashboards to the new builder, instead having to rebuild everything from scratch. In addition, there is going to be a usability loss for Support Managers in my business without bookmarks.
I completely agree with a lot of the concerns mentioned above!
Especially:
Please Zendesk, do not force your customers into settling with a "half-way-there" product upgrade/release once again - it ruins your credibility.
Explore is already challenging when you need to combine reports and graphs and create queries from several data sets.
And now this, really?
ZD, It feels like you are trying to force us to leave the platform.
I believe you did some research and check the % of churn because of it.
I agree with most requests here but specially one: Converting classic dashboards to the new builder automatically needs to be an option (both for Dashboards and, if the situation will be the same, for the report builder).
4 years ago there was the migration from Insights to Explore, now this change. Recreating reports can have a very high cost and the return of investment that the new Dashboard will bring is, at least, questionable at the moment. Simplifying the migration should be a priority
Hello ZenDesk Team,
I feel very uncomfortable with this decision, you can't just discontinue our old reports. I put a lot of effort into these reports and now you tell me I need to recreate them? That is just very inefficient.
A few months ago you announced out of the blue that certain placeholders can't be used anymore in automations. And now you pull this. My confidence in your services are shrinking as you actively reduce the benefits we have with your platform while rudimentary functions like ticket splitting, adding CCs via Makros or direct Team chats are still not available.
In this case either a converter to the new builder is necessary or legacy support for the old dashboards. It is more and more difficult for me to justify the license costs to my management.
Well then. Having seen the (lack of) feedback in the features post, I guess the only response we can give to this one is
Agree with other comments above. We are managing several zendesk instances, not one so in our case manual migration of all custom dashboards will be complicated.
To be able to plan this migration on our side we need to see clear dates on GA launch, as we cannot start migration with half of critical features missing.
Second migration in 5 years without proper migration tool?
What!! We have done so much work to get our dashboards up to scratch and they are going to be useless! This shouldn't be allowed. Are we going to be reimbursed for the resource used to create the dashboards? Will there be a automatic migration? we have tried the beta dashboards and they are limited compared to the indepth we use. This isn't the first time this changes have happened which destroy work, when you changed the way drill-throughs were used then it destroyed alot of work and undid the basic drill-throughs.
Like many other comments, what are the steps to convert a current "classic" dashboard to the new dashboard? Is it a manual process or is there some kind of automation to the new experience?
I think this change should no affect to all the current dashboards as many of us have invested several hours to create them. Maybe leaving the old ones, at least, should be an option or an automatic migration that shouldn't require us to spend even more time on this topic.
On the other hand, what will eventually happen to functionalities such as bookmarks, delivery scheduling, hidden filters?
The way you are considering it is not a migration as such, but a complete redesign, needing to rethink the solution taking into account the limitations of the new tool, leading to an unnecessary increase in dedication and for which many of our customers have already paid.
Having to incur new costs makes it difficult to justify the use of Zendesk on a maintenance level, especially with future changes like this one
I agree with the above comments and have many concerns about this change. We were forced to migrate from Zendesk reporting to Explore, and now you are asking us to move to these new dashboards. We don't have resources sitting around that can move all our dashboards over and scrap all the work they already put into building the current dashboards. Additionally, this is a redesign and will involve in-depth gap analysis as well as training for all our users. It should be a configurable option that admins that choose to enable if desired. If it's forced, you should have plans for automatic migration with minimal disruption to your customers and all existing features should be accounted for in the new design.
Just counted....we have a total of 55 dashboards, many of which have multiple tabs, in use by our end-users, agents, team-leaders and management.
Generally it is myself who looks after these.... please confirm there is going to be an automated conversion process?
I agree with all of the above comments. We manage several instances with a dozen of custom dashboards in each one, all build with the classic builder. The manual transition of each dashboard is going to require a lot of resources, time and planning.
Unfortunately, we cannot even start early as some of the critical features are missing. One such feature which is rather simple is the lack of tabs.
Please advise on proper dates as to when the aforementioned changes will take effect as we need to come up with a proper plan.
The impact is so high! We worked weeks on getting it ready!
I'd like to challenge the 61% figure mentioned in this post as I feel it's quite skewed. These 61% of users could be new users to utilising Zendesk Explore and don't know how to use the classic dashboard builder, so they opt for the beta version (which is totally fine for them and their needs) which is the simple option to use, yet lacking so many features.
I don't think it's fair for you to create a new version of a dashboard building and remove half the options which are currently present today and being utilised by a variety of people in order to build complex reporting and dashboards.
Explore takes a lot of time and effort to invest in building dashboards and reporting for more advanced users. This new dashboard experience should be a 1:1 comparative experience here. After assessing the comparison list here, a bunch of existing features from the classic dashboards are not being included in GA and post GA so It feels like we going to end up with a 1:-2 experience in the end. E.G Bookmarks, Images, legends, metric filters and export options to name a few. These are all valid features that businesses use to be able to report data back to stakeholders etc + not make their reports look boring.
Zendesk users have gone from using Insights (100% customizable dashboards and reports) > to Zendesk Explore (which is about 80% customisable dashboards). The move to the new versions of the dashboard builder is pretty much dropping it down to 50% customizable now.
Spot on Amie Brennan - Insights to Explore was bad enough, this is further and larger steps backwards and will surely push people to use other reporting tools and/or platforms for their support needs.
Dear customers,
first off, I just wanted to thank you all for taking the time to voice your concerns about this transition. We deliberately published our proposed plan to be more transparent about our intentions for the classic dashboard builder following the GA of the new dashboard builder.
We have heard your feedback, we now need to regroup to consider all that you have shared and come back to this thread with a potentially revised plan.
Additionally, we might reach out to some of you individually to hear your feedback more directly and to validate some of our revised thinking.
Thank you all again for your candid feedback.
Best regards,
Walter
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