Enable Users to Create Their Own Reports

Related products: CS Reports & Dashboards

It would be great for non-admin users to create their own reports instead of having to go through Gainsight admins. The increased need for custom reports makes it so that admins have to create reports to satisfy the needs of the individual instead of a group. This creates duplicate work that ultimately fills up dashboards (in order for non-admin users to see a report) when it would be easier for a user to create and view their own reports in their private repository (sort of like how SFDC has their reports).





Since only 6-12 reports can be viewed in a dashboard, too many custom reports requires the creation of more dashboards, which will eventually become confusing as the number of dashboards increases. 
You can give your users the report builder tab to build their own reports. I don't know if there is the concept of "my personal reports" like Salesforce has; I have not explored that yet.


https://support.gainsight.com/hc/en-us/articles/204276188-Grant-Permission-to-Create-Reports-2-0)
Would this give users access to the whole report repository? We want to allow users to create their own reports, but we don't want to give them access to every report, in the event they change something and we aren't aware. 
The only thing I'm aware of for that is the ability to lock filters. I have not discovered anything for restricting access to specific reports or giving view only access. I'd love to know if this exists or is on the product road map as well.
Hi Kaycee,





Allowing non-admin users to create reports is in our short-medium term roadmap. Will provide ETA once we internally discuss and prioritise.





Thanks!
This would be very helpful. Could you provide an updated ETA?
Sumesh - I assume that as part of allowing non-admin users the ability to create reports you are also working on a folder structure?  We must have a way to keep things organized - and prevent non-admin users from editing/deleting admin-created reports - otherwise this will cause more problems than it will solve.
When non-admins create reports, I would think they could only edit/delete reports they create. 
I hope so too. But didn't want to assume.  





The folder thing though...is an absolute must.
Would love to hear from the Reports team on what the roadmap looks like for:


1. Allowing non-admin users to create their own reports (granted permission from the Gainsight Admin), and





2. Making sure they are limited to creating/cloning/editing/deleting their own reports only - the 'Personal report folder' concept mentioned above - 





3. A little further down the road, allowing them to build a personal dashboard - but I'll trade that further down the road if it helps us give end users a personal report space/folder sooner! 
+1. Things can get overwhelming for an Admin as the CS team grows with the current restriction. I would love to see the ability to create custom dashboards by non-admin users since I have observed different people on my team are requesting for different views. 
Related question to this request - do you feel that non-admin end users would know enough about the various SFDC and Gainsight object structures to build out the reports that contain the data they're looking for?





The main reason I ask is that I recall my first few months working in Gainsight and the plethora of objects to choose from and their respective fields nearly blew my mind. I needed a lot of help to build reports when I was starting out.
Probably not. Creating MDA reports is incredulous even for the most experienced Gainsight admin.
Hey Scott,





Reporting for non-admin users in on our roadmap and all the ideas you mentioned (controlling the access, giving permissions to only their reports in a personal folder and giving the ability to create their own dashboards eventually) are considered as part of this thought process. However, there is still no clarity on the ETA for this feature.





Are you looking for any specific information?/





Thanks


Venky
1) I believe you can give report builder access to non-admins (see Support Documentation)





2) Agree! I've needed this myself and have had customers need this.





3) 100% agree!
Hello Venky - With the popularity of the reques,t and two additional requests for the same feature from newer Gainsight customers, wanted to see if there is a ballpark ETA yet (by end-of-calendar year, for instance, as opposed to next year) - if so, please let us know -thank you!
There is the Gainsight object dictionary now - that does help newer users - and the assumption is that (for the requests I'm involved in) the end users needing this are super-user types - work in SFDC and other reporting tools - so they can do some sink-or-swim learning without impacting anything else in the larger org.
The most challenging thing for me is knowing which columns to use for what.  Today I was trying to create an Activity Timeline report and assumed that the Author would be what I use to show who created a timeline entry, but those columns are blank.  Using "User" didn't seem intuitively correct but that appears to be where the value is held.





Also when you're creating drill downs, several of the columns will have the same name, i.e. Name from CSM lookup, Company lookup, etc.  


https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/reports-allow-relabel-of-report-detail-headings





Plus educating end users on lookups, etc.  It's a challenge for sure.





I would almost say we restrict end user report building to data spaces defined by the Gainsight admin, that way it reduces the amount of trial and error on the part of end users.  Similar to report types in SF.  At least for objects in SF.  Hopefully Data Spaces for MDA will come soon.