Spring 2024 Release Notes

Discover the new features, improvements, and bug fixes for the latest release.

Check out the What's New videos for an overview of the new features and don't forget to visit the Visier Portal to request and vote on new features.

Platform

This section covers the changes to Visier's People Data Platform.

Patch updates

June 12 - Per-Tenant PGP Keys

Per-tenant PGP keys have been introduced for data file uploads. Some organizations use PGP to encrypt data files when sending them to Visier over SFTP or HTTPS for an additional layer of protection against data disclosure. The move to per-tenant PGP keys enhances data security by ensuring that users from one tenant, if they were able to gain access to the PGP encrypted data file of another tenant, cannot decrypt the file in Studio.

The shared Visier PGP key will be deprecated in a future release, once users have had an opportunity to migrate to the new per-tenant keys.

We suggest not sharing files encrypted with the Visier Public PGP Key with any third parties, and instead to only ever use secure, supported file upload mechanisms to send data to Visier.

To take advantage of this security enhancement and migrate to a per-tenant PGP, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

What's new

Suggested Filters

Analysis authors can now add dimensions to analysis filters, making it easier for viewers to get insights.

Ask Visier is now Search

We’ve renamed the Ask Visier room to Search to accurately represent the functionality provided. Use search to quickly find metrics, analyses, employees, and plans that you own or have access to.

Display Metric and Percent Labels in Visuals

To improve the comprehension of data in the Breakdown and Trend Breakdown visualizations, you can now show metric and percentage values at the same time.

Data Enrichment On Demand

Administrators can now run a data enrichment job to see their configuration changes immediately. Ensure your prediction or standardization configurations have been published to production before you run the job.

Note: Configuration is required for this feature.

Data Version Validation

Administrators can now define alerts on incoming data versions to validate if new data is good:

  • Metric alert: Checks if a metric value exceeds the expected range specified by the user.
  • Subject member alert: Expects that a specific subject member's property value will not change from a certain value.
  • User group alert: Checks if users have been added to or removed from a specific user group.
  • System alert: Compares metric values from data version to data version (DV to DV).

Alerts can be configured to send notifications and fail data versions to prevent publishing bad data to your users.

For more information, see Alerts and Create or Configure a User Group Alert.

Note: Data is required for this feature.

Improvements in Previewing Project Data Versions

Administrators can now easily preview data versions created in projects, without changing the release behavior of the data version in the projects. This feature is available for primary data categories.

Note: Data is required for this feature.

Mappings Room Enhancements

We made the following changes to the Mappings room:

  • Previously, a mapping had the Configure and Basic Information tabs. Now, a mapping has Map, Configure, and Basic Information tabs.
  • In the Configure tab, you can change the mapping's settings and record filter.
  • In the Map tab, you can map properties in Visier to data columns in your source data.

Runtime Estimation for Extraction Jobs

In the Jobs room, you can now see an estimation of the total run time for in progress extraction jobs.

Note: Data is required for this feature.

Source Query Enhancements

We made the following enhancements to the source query tool:

  • Auto-complete: When writing a query, you can now use auto-complete and syntax highlighting for functions, query keywords, sources, and column names.
  • Source directory: In the source query tool, you can now access a source directory to view a list of sources and columns to query from. You can also insert sources and columns into the query from the directory.
  • Result table: In the query results table, you can now copy the cell and column values. You can also view the query results table in full screen.
  • Session: We now save your session, including your query formula and the results table. This means you can navigate to other rooms in Visier and keep your query session in the Query room. You can refresh the browser to reset the session.

Note: Data is required for this feature.

Support for Multiple Data Categories

We added new enhancements to support multiple data categories in a tenant. You can now run jobs for multiple data categories at the same time, assign a unique release behavior to different data categories, and see data version information for each data category in the Data Categories room in a project.

Note: Data is required for this feature.

More Security Around Data Access Management

We’ve implemented additional safeguards that further limit who can manage permissions, change user groups, and preview as other users. If this feature is enabled, administrators will need the Super Admin permission to perform the listed actions.

Note:  

  • Limited Availability This feature is in limited availability. If you are interested, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

  • Data is required for this feature.

Power BI Connector

We made the following enhancements to the Power BI connector:

  • Renamed "list" query to "snapshot" query to align with the Visier Data Query API.
  • Added options to query the latest or earliest complete data period.
  • For snapshot queries, date properties now return values in Date format. Before, date properties returned values in Epoch milliseconds.

Note: Limited Availability This feature is in limited availability. If you are interested, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Tableau Connector

We made the following enhancements to the Tableau connector:

  • You can now retrieve overlay data from Visier.
  • Added support for OAuth 2.0 authentication.
  • Removed requirement for client credentials for secure token authentication.
  • Added SQL-like query option.
  • Renamed "list" query to "snapshot" query to align with the Visier Data Query API.
  • Added options to query the latest or earliest complete data period.
  • For snapshot queries, date properties now return values in Date format. Before, date properties returned values in Epoch milliseconds.

Note: Limited Availability This feature is in limited availability. If you are interested, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

APIs

Data Query API

We made the following enhancements to the Data Query API:

  • When making list and snapshot queries, you can now display datetime values in yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ssZZ format.
  • You can now get results in compact format; for example, in COMPACT_DISPLAY mode, the time interval member 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000Z/2022-07-01T00:00:00.000Z - [12] becomes Jun 30, 2022. This applies primarily to time members for event-based metrics.
  • You can now retrieve data from the earliest or latest complete period of data; for example, if you have Employee data available from 2023-01-01 to 2023-03-15 (end date exclusive), specifying dynamicDateFrom: COMPLETE_PERIOD with direction: BACKWARD means the query will retrieve data backward from 2023-03-01 because it is the latest complete period.

Permission Management API

We made the following enhancements to the Permission Management API:

  • If your organization adds new columns to your data, you can now use the Permission Management API to secure access to those columns before the data is sent to Visier. You can streamline your data security workflow by updating population and data access ahead of time through this API before Visier receives the new data columns or before you create the objects in Visier.
  • You can now use the API to assign prebuilt data access sets to permissions.

Note: Limited Availability This feature is in limited availability. If you are interested, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Visier People

This section covers the changes to the content of the Visier People solution.

Visier People Essentials

What's new

Employee Exit Dynamic Compa Ratio Metric

We’ve added a new metric that calculates the average base pay for employees who exited the organization compared to the average of all corresponding pay level midpoints, based on actual employee pay ranges.

Organization

Patch updates

August 7 - Update on Reporting Level Property

Previously, the calculated property "Reporting Level" wasn’t consistently assigning a value of 0 to the CEO, which impacted metric calculations relying on this property. We've corrected the formula to ensure that the CEO always has a reporting level of 0 and that the reporting levels of other employees are consequently assigned correctly.

Planning

What's new

Updated Headcount and Cost Model

We’ve added a new Headcount and Cost Planning model that is similar to the classic model, but allows for more customization and supports managed planning. To better distinguish between the two, we’ve named the models as follows:

  • Headcount and Cost Planning (Classic)
  • Headcount and Cost Planning (New)

Datasets and Enrichments

What's new

Updates to Visier's Job Taxonomy

As part of our continued expansion of our job architecture, we’ve added industry-specialized jobs for Production Managers and Technical Writers. We’ve also improved the consistency of labeling across all job types.

Visier Benchmarks

What's new

New measured values for Visier Benchmarks Trend

We've added measured values for Q4 2023.

New measured values for Visier Benchmarks Report

We've added measured values for 2023.

Visier Benchmarks Documentation Update

We’ve updated the metric explanations to explain why data sparsity exists in Visier Benchmarks Report. Visier Benchmarks Report was introduced to address the sparsity in the Visier Benchmarks Trend data as we are able to interpolate some of the missing values using the available data.

Summary of dataset

The Visier Benchmarks dataset was last updated May 2024.

  • Benchmark values available: 240,752,370.
  • Employee records in dataset: 23,937,477

The current breakdown of Visier Benchmarks Trend:

  • Measured values from Q1 2019 to Q4 2023.
  • Extrapolated values from Q1 2024 to Q4 2024.

The current breakdown of Visier Benchmarks Report:

  • Measured values from 2017 to 2023.
  • Extrapolated values for 2024 and 2025.