The IRIS Practice Engine roadmap, Data Warehouse and 9.7: your questions answered

IRIS Practice Engine
By Mari Sharpe | 09/25/2020 | 2 min read

The IRIS Practice Engine team recently welcomed customers to our online user group sessions. On day one, we focused on where we are now with IRIS Practice Engine – looking at what is available in 9.7, the release of this version, the roadmap and also the Data Warehouse.

A number of pertinent questions were raised by attendees. Below, we give you all these and the answers.

Q1: Tim, you are obviously passionate about the Data Warehouse. If you had one key benefit for our customers to consider and think about, what would it be? (Answered by Tim Johnstone)

I believe it’s an important takeaway from the experience of Buzzacott, that consistency was an important factor that they had to control.

Reports were developed centrally (to help apply consistency), and reports were written to the whole company, even if requested by a single department; and then filtered to the one department. This helped with reconciliation.

It was an important benefit but a conscious one on their part to follow-through on with the implementation of the warehouse.

Q2: Is there a schedule of the feature requests being developed? (Answered by Michelle Harris)

We hold a list of feature requests that have been entered onto ZenDesk, sent via Account Managers, or sent directly to me. Any feature requests that are sent directly are also added onto ZenDesk.

These are reviewed regularly and are assessed based on several criteria – number of votes, whether it is viable, and whether it fits into the current development area.

There is no fixed schedule, but once they have been agreed upon – they are marked as Planned in ZenDesk. I am also planning on running some regular Discovery sessions to get feedback on the reviewed feature requests.

Q3: Any security on the new PE Views/ Data Insights project? For example, limiting the clients they can see? (Answered by Andrew Hambly and Tim Johnstone)

While we’re not settled on what form this will ultimately take, and how much of it will be centered around Engine data or Warehouse data, any queries against Engine data would expect to follow the Organization, Office and Department security permissions.

Beyond that, it depends on the possibilities of the technology when chosen.

Q4: Are there any plans to overhaul provisions? (Answered by Andrew Hambly)

Not currently, but if enough clients want changes then it will be considered.

Q5: Will Special Portfolios remain following the conversion of classic pages? (Answered by Andrew Hambly)

Yes, they are being converted to V9 pages. This will be done as part of V9.8.

What next?

The input from customers is absolutely vital for us to make IRIS Practice Engine even better.

The webinars/ user group virtual meetings proved to be a really productive and helpful exercise and we are planning to run these half yearly, with the next one being planned for December.

We answered many other questions on days two and three. To learn more about these, please see our follow up blogs:

What does the future hold for IRIS Practice Engine?

Banking and integrations: your questions answered