The product eco-system is getting less crowded!!
The recent announcement that MicroStrategy “Desktop” would be phased out and merged with the “WorkStation” tool seems to be coming to fruition. This past weekend, MicroStrategy pushed out a “WorkStation” update that appears to indicate the start of the deprecating process.
A quick reminder. Desktop is a tool designed for End Users to build Dossiers on a PC or Mac. Confusingly, WorkStation also has these identical capabilities, but with the addition of many more developer and administrator features.
The question was always – “Which tool to deploy to End Users?”
Desktop or WorkStation?
Thankfully, everything is about to become less confusing with the transition to a single tool for all “PC/Mac Dashboard Ddevelopment”.ย
WHAT’S THE NEW EXPERIENCE LIKE?
Launching WorkStation in an “offline” configuration, you will now see a more simplified interface, like Desktop. As soon as you connect WorkStation to your IServer environment, additional developer / administrator options will now appear. I do not know if these additional options appear “based on your existing privileges” or if all options appear for all connected users. I need to dig a bit further into this and will let you know…
MicroStrategy has indicated that the Desktop tool will continue to be supported for the near future. However, I would expect Desktop to be gradually phased out over the coming year or two.
Overall, this is a good change. The more we can simplify the product eco-system, the better. It was starting to get a little confusing with WorkStation, Desktop, MicroStrategy App and Developer.
Let’s continue to watch this space in 2021