Connectors 2.0 Change Document
This article explains the pain points of the existing Connectors 2.0 and the benefits of upgrading to new Connectors 2.0 Horizon Experience. It contains the following sections:
- User Pain Points before Connectors 2.0 Upgrade
- What’s new in Connectors 2.0 Horizon Experience?
- Does the admin need to do anything once this upgrade is complete?
- What is Horizon Experience?
User Pain Points before Connectors 2.0 Upgrade
Connections
- Difficult to distinguish between authorized connections and available sources.
- Connection creation and authorization are distinct steps, despite the fact that authorization is required when connecting to external systems. This creates confusion and leads to the establishment of unauthorized connections with no purpose.
- On authorization, Gainsight creates OOB jobs that need to be scheduled by Admins which is not apparent to them.
Jobs
- No options to create jobs from the jobs tab. Need to switch back to the connection tab, find the right connection and identify the job creation label.
- No options to find failing jobs to take corrective actions. They need to manually scroll through the list of jobs, if looking for a specific job which failed.
- Finding all jobs of a specific connection is difficult, if there are more jobs/connections.
- Lack of information hierarchy and proper data grouping. For example, job schedule and notification emails are placed in separate sections as well as direct and derived mapping.
- Does not address typical functional use cases. A typical use case is to merge multiple source datasets, apply appropriate filters, and then import data into a Gainsight domain model. Currently, the only way to solve this is to create multiple jobs and a rule.
- An overall summary is missing, so users don’t get an idea of what is actually being created before execution.
Activity/Logs
- No filters to distinguish activities according to each connection or job.
- Need to scroll through a series of logs to know the status of a specific job that was executed.
- It takes a significant amount of effort to determine whether a change in job configuration caused a failure.
- Each log must be opened explicitly each time to see the count/reason for failure.
Job Execution Set
- Since dependent jobs only allow for one step in the, administrators must create the sequence by including dependent jobs in each job. It is difficult to create and identify such sequences; each job must be viewed individually.
- The Job execution set concept is not clearly presented, administrators create redundant schedules, resulting in an excessive number of job executions.
What’s New in new Connectors 2.0 Horizon Experience?
Connectors 2.0 Horizon Experience is majorly dominated by the Horizon Design System. The main purpose of the Horizon Design System is to simplify the product and improve customer experience in every way possible such as improving existing functionalities or adding new enhancements. The following are the new functionalities and improvements:
- New Connectors: If you have the Sightline Integrations package enabled, you will be able to create connections with Google BigQuery, Freshdesk, Intercom, Jira, ServiceNow and Zuora.
- Enhanced Job Creation: Simply create a job by dragging and dropping source and target objects to sync data with Gainsight. Learn more
- Job Chains: Simplify the process of scheduling a group of dependent Jobs that need to run in a particular sequence. Learn more
- Ability to Merge/Transform Data: Merge data from two source objects and then transform data to sync with Gainsight. This feature is available to the following connectors only. Learn more
- Snowflake
- Big Query
- Freshdesk
- Intercom
- Jira
- Pipedrive
- ServiceNow
- Zendesk
- Zoho
- Zuora
Does the admin need to do anything once this upgrade is complete?
Yes, if the customer is using any of the following connectors and Zendesk widget:
- Zendesk connector: If you have an existing Zendesk connector (in the old user interface) and want to use the latest Zendesk connector (in the new user interface), then please go through the following important points:
- To link the Gainsight widget (in Zendesk) to the new Zendesk Connector, unlink the widget from the old Zendesk connector and link it from the new Zendesk connector.
- Old Zendesk connector stores data in Gainsight custom object
- New Zendesk connector stores data into Gainsight standard objects called 'Case'
- If you create the new Zendesk connector, then Gainsight will not be migrating the old data from that custom object to Case object
- However, once the new Zendesk connector is working fine and rules, CTAs, etc. are replicated based on the standard Case object, it is recommended to remove the old Zendesk connection.
- Snowflake Connector: If you previously whitelisted IPs in your Snowflake instance, please whitelist the updated list of IPs. To obtain the most up-to-date list of IP addresses, please submit a support ticket.
For more information about the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), refer here.
What is Horizon Experience?
The Horizon Experience is Gainsight’s simple, intuitive, beautiful product experience - intended to reduce time to value and admin effort, and streamline end-user experience. In 2020, many of the primary user-facing modules will be released in the Horizon Experience. Right now, you can see it in action in our Mobile experience and in applications like Data Designer, Renewal Center, and Experience Center. The Horizon Experience consists of a design system and technical component library to ensure consistency across modules and platforms.
Check out this 1-min. video for a glimpse of the Horizon Experience in the Gainsight applications!
For more FAQs on the Horizon Experience, refer to the Horizon Experience FAQ article.