data strategy

Integrate Any Data With Power BI

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Does your data management strategy work for the 21st century?

Power BI is beside Google Data Studio and Tableau as one of the most popular data visualization tools on the market today. This has been the case in 2019 and Microsoft is sure to have the tool on the list of top 10 software players in the segment in 2020 as well.

The main focus of Power BI is data visualization, but creating visualizations is just one small piece of your data management puzzle. Before you get to composing complex dashboards, there is a significant process involved to properly get your data to pass through, so creating the dashboard itself just the tip of the iceberg. The trickiest part of the data management process is data preparation. If you don’t have the right data inputs, the generation of your business intelligence reports can become a time-consuming nightmare. So what issues might you come across when working with dashboarding apps and how can you easily navigate them?

Many companies have chosen to build out custom connectors for their data. They hire a developer either in-house or on contract to build their custom data pipelines. This may be a solution, but it’s likely not the best as there are lots of issues you will likely come across sooner or later. For example, there is problematic maintenance since you’ll likely need to stray from your initial data pipeline configuration. Once your data needs change, your system can be left out-of-date and you’ll need to reconfigure the entire data pipeline which can involve costly and time-consuming development. Custom data connector development also comes without comprehensive monitoring, meaning once one of your data source APIs updates, which for some services is quite often, you likely won’t find out about issues until the data flow is already broken. Another concern is that employees and contractors come and go and if the person who was tasked with building custom pipelines leaves, you’ll need to transfer the responsibility of the system to a new developer who likely has no knowledge about your system.

So how can your organization maintain a system of sustainable data management? The best way to simplify your organization’s data journey, easily manipulate the data structure on-the-fly and seamlessly create complex reports without the need for external developers and additional costs is to use reliable, secure and user-friendly data management tool. Many efficient companies today are utilizing managed services with easy to use interfaces, built-in proactive monitoring, and ultra-flexible architecture. Tools like this allow organizations to easily add new data connectors to create data sources or switch data output from one BI tool to another as business needs change.

Perhaps the most significant value gained by utilizing a tool like this is having one single point for all data management which makes your processes much more organized and frictionless, saving you time and money. Dataddo can connect all of your data sources with your BI tools or dashboarding apps like PowerBI or even your data storage solution so you can manage all of your data from one place without writing a single line of code.

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data strategy

Integrate Any Data With Tableau

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

It’s not just about creating dashboards!

Tableau stands beside Google Data Studio and Power BI on the list of the most popular data visualization tools on the market.  The platform is one of the top 10 software players in this segment in the last few years.

The main focus of Tableau is easy data visualization and the tool makes it simple to create beautiful dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface. The tricky part tends to come in the beginning when users need to deal with setting up data inputs. Even though we tend to simply focus on data visualization, this is only the final part of your data management process. Without an efficient routine to handle data inputs, the generation of your reports can become a time-consuming nightmare.

One of the biggest trouble makers can be a custom-built data pipelines. Why? Because they require hiring a developer who builds your data pipelines which tend to be one-time solutions, hardly adaptable to your changing needs. Once your needs change, your system is suddenly rendered out-of-date and you’ll need to rebuild the whole pipeline with additional costs and wasted time. Another aspect is that many APIs are updated quite often and with the absence of comprehensive development, your data inputs can stop working properly. There is also the issue of maintenance and if your developer leaves the company, you must transfer the responsibility to a new party since all of his knowledge about the system is gone you’re forced to start the process over from the ground up.

So how can you build your company’s data management processes on stable foundations?

In order to simplify your data journey and easily change the current data structure of your inputs without the need for external developers and additional costs, you can use a reliable, secure and user-friendly data integration platform. A clear new trend is the use of a managed service with up-to-date interfaces, built-in proactive monitoring, and flexible architecture. With such a tool, once your needs change you can easily add a new data source, reconfigure data structures and setup all of your data outputs using a friendly user interface. On the data destination side, you can also easily switch from one BI tool or data warehouse to another. The crucial value is that you can manage all your processes from one place via one platform – a single place for your data management. Having everything managed with one tool makes the entire process much more organized and frictionless. Dataddo can connect all of your data sources with your BI tools, dashboarding apps and data storage solutions and you don’t need to write a single line of code.  

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data strategy

How to integrate Exact Online data with your dashboarding apps

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Need to integrate your Exact Online with Tableau, Google Data Studio,
Power BI or other BI tools? It’s easy with Dataddo!

Exact Online is a powerful software that automates accounting, financial, ERP, HRM, and CRM related processes. The platform is very popular, especially in the Benelux area.  While Exact is a very complex and highly customizable software, platforms like this can often cause further data-related headaches for organizations. Sometimes you might need to combine data from Exact with data from other BI data sources, or you might need to visualize the data from Exact in dashboarding tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Power BI and others. As the software is highly customizable, it can also prove to be tricky to connect to other systems. This makes the task of getting all data consolidated into dashboards or other platforms a very daunting proposition.

In most cases, setting up data pipelines isn’t just a one time task and you might need to extract and integrate your data for other purposes like setting up weekly or monthly reports.  

Setting these pipelines up manually can take days or even weeks of custom coding and development, only to be revisited down the road when one of your tools has an API update. You have a few options: you can hire an in-house team that’s dedicated to data governance, sub out a software engineer who develops custom pipelines and bills you for maintenance and updates, or   you can use a universal data integration pipeline like Dataddo, which covers all of your potential data issues at a fraction of the cost. 

Dataddo, a no-code data integration platform is able to easily connect Exact Online and any other data sources to various data destinations. Dataddo can easily adapt to variable customized platform environments. Data from any system can be smoothly integrated and delivered to different BI tools for visualization with very little effort. Getting all of your data where it needs to go no longer requires all of the headaches with Dataddo.

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data strategy

HubSpot data reporting – an unsolvable problem?

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

HubSpot is one of the most popular marketing, sales, and customer service platforms used by thousands of companies in over 100 countries. Using tools like Hubspot and other cloud-based BI services has become a necessity for data-conscious businesses today. More and more companies are also turning to business intelligence tools like Tableau and Google Data Studio for reporting and creating dashboards to help visualize and better utilize their data. The problem is, it can be rather difficult to blend HubSpot data containing leads, analytics, sales or customer service information with data from other sources within BI tools for visualization and reporting.

One of HubSpot’s key features is the ability for users to customize the platform to perfectly meet their company’s needs. Unfortunately, there are some headaches that come along with the highly customizable data that the platform can provide. High customizability makes the Hubspot platform quite difficult to connect to other BI services and tools like Tableau, GDS and others. These services often require extra work when trying to create consolidated reports containing both Hubspot data and data from other analytics or project management services.

The solution is Dataddo, our no-code data integration platform able to easily connect HubSpot and any other data sources to your various data destinations. Thanks to our robust data transformation engine, organizations can easily adapt to variable customized platform environments. Data from virtually any system can be easily integrated and delivered where it needs to go without writing a line of code, so setting up data pipelines doesn’t need to be a pain point any longer.

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Uncategorized

CRA & Dataddo to Offer IoT Data Processing Platform

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

Ceske Radiokomunikace (CRA) is a provider of television, radio and internet infrastructure. CRA announced that they’re entering the business intelligence and big data market segments as part of their IoT services offering in cooperation with Dataddo.

CRA now offers a solution to connect IoT infrastructure and the CRA cloud with the integration of Dataddo. The solution provides data encoding, decoding, transformation and delivery.

The Dataddo platform processes data from LoRaWAN devices transmitted by the CRA network and transforms the datasets into formats digestible by BI tools and Big Data storage platforms. This allows customers to easily tie this new type of IoT data into their existing IT stack very quickly without extensive engineering tasks.

Dataddo is a cloud-based data integration, automation and transformation platform designed to work with almost any online data service such as CRMs, analytics platforms, ERPs, or project management tools. Thanks to a robust automation and data transformation infrastructure, Dataddo can transform and wire the data to a wide range of databases, DWHs, cloud storages, dashboarding and BI applications allowing for smooth interoperability with existing IT and BI stacks.

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data strategy

How to win the battle with data fragmentation

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

How can I move my data management methods into the 21st century?

Let me tell you a story which that unfolds every day in thousands of offices around the world. Imagine a guy, let’s call him Joe. Joe is sitting behind his desk, looking at the monitors he rummages through dozens of reports from the various web services that his company utilizes.

On the one hand he is using Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to track his website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube to share content and build a community, Smartly to manage social advertising, Google Ad Manager and Google Ads to run the campaigns,  Stripe for billing and Salesforce as a cloud CRM,  Brandwatch to get insights about his brand, Social Bakers for social media management and monitoring. Some of these tools are used for internal purposes and some on behalf of his clients.

And on the other hand, Joe is using Tableau, Google Data Studio, Klipfolio, Zoho Analytics or other tools to visualize this data. Now Joe is asking a simple question. How the hell do I consolidate and make sense of all of this data? How can I handle it all without a team of developers to consolidate all my company’s data infrastructure?

Joe is stuck, he is desperate and he is out of time because he needs his consolidated reports now, he needs them quickly and he’ll need them again tomorrow and likely next week. Moreover, his needs may change in a few weeks and he’ll need to reconfigure his data infrastructure quickly.  

So what is the solution for Joe? The answer is a flexible and universal no-code data integration platform capable of connecting all of his data sources and consolidating the data, prepping it and delivering it anywhere anytime he needs. He needs to be able to connect his sources to any BI tool, data warehouse or FTP/FSTP server and it needs to be easy to execute.  Why? Because it’s 2019.  The days of manual data handling processes are over. This solution has only seven letters – Dataddo.

Does this story sound familiar to you? Give Dataddo a try and solve all of your data problems in just a few clicks. Dataddo connects all of your data sources to your BI tools, dashboarding apps and data storage solutions because sometimes being retro is cool, but not when it comes to working with your company’s data!

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data strategy

Making Klipfolio a Fitting Piece of Your Existing IT Puzzle

Posted on by Zdenek Pecha

What are the data handling limitations that come with Klipfolio?

Klipfolio is beside Tableau, Zoho Analytics and Google Data Studio as one of the most popular data visualization tools on the market today. We can say that it is in the top 10 software players in this segment in 2019.

Klipfolio’s main focus is on data visualization and they offer a powerful solution. But while visualization is great, it’s only the end result of the data puzzle. Your data has to come a long way from measuring, collecting, consolidation, preparation and then final output to your visualization tool for interpretation. In order to generate aesthetically pleasing, all-inclusive reports for your team members or clients, one must navigate each step in the data handling process which can be rather time consuming. 

So what are some of the issues you have to solve when working with a visualization tool and how should you deal with them? The answer is a no-code data integration platform capable of automating and simplifying your company data journey without the need for external developers and additional costs. Dataddo can connect all of your data with your BI tools, dashboarding apps and data storage solutions and you don’t need to write a single line of code.

Although Klipfolio provides somewhat universal connectors to CSV or JSON data, there are multiple cases when this solution cannot be used:

  • An increasing number of APIs utilize the OAuth 2.0 authorization scheme. The lack of a generic OAuth2 authorizer prohibits connection to such services.
  • Some APIs must perform multiple calls to obtain the desired result. E.g. number of results per single call is limited, so it is necessary to traverse using workarounds or to work with dynamically generated cursors.
  • Many APIs require the use of dynamic parameters produced as results of a different call, like using one call to get all Users IDS and then dynamically “emitting” a call for each User to obtain details.

With a growing number of data sources that companies need to connect to and ever- changing data handling needs, it’s important to have an infrastructure in place that is as flexible as possible. Additionally, your data management has to stand on a solid foundation, on a data pipeline that connects all of your data sources, all of your online services and all of your data destinations. The entire process should be so seamless, simple and flexible that you forget that you are even using a data handling pipeline. That’s the value that Dataddo can bring to your company’s data management infrastructure.

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