Use Komment™ as collaboration tool in Qlik Sense

Collaborate with your team directly in Qlik Sense

With Komment™ it is not only possible to write and edit data directly in your Qlik Sense apps but you can also use it for more informal team chat and collaboration. Given the flexibility of Komment™ you decide whether to have the collaboration element tied up to a specific chart, a specific sheet or the whole app. It may sound complicated but read on to learn how easy it is to accomplish.

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Don't we need a separate extension for that?

Yes, other writeback extensions vendors have a separate extension for collaboration. That is not the case with Komment™. The reason is that Komment™ is as flexible as Qlik Sense so with some creativity you can turn it into a collaborative tool. Sure, the collaboration tool you can design with Komment™ won't have all the bells and whistles as the other ones but as you will find out below it will easily cover the most important needs. That means that you can start a conversation, provide your input, give your team an update or simply just let your team know your thoughts about the data you are working with.

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Collaboration in Qlik Sense using Komment™

Now let's get into the fun stuff so you can see how easy it is to get it up and running.

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The need

You have made your Qlik Sense dashboard ready for use and analysis for the happy Qlik Sense business users. For one of the charts your users have asked for a way to communicate easily about the contents and impact of what the chart is showing:

They could of course do this via mail, Teams, Slack or even keep an Excel file for the purpose of keeping track of the communication. However, why do that when you can let them communicate directly on the sheet in the Qlik Sense app? Exactly - let's bring on Komment™.

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Setting up Komment™

Fortunately it only takes a few minutes of work to provide your users with a collaboration tool directly in your app.

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1. Create new table(s)

You need a table to hold the comments and updates that your users will enter using the collaboration tool. So you simply setup an empty table with the needed fields. In this example we will allow users to enter a comment and select who of their colleagues that should be tagged. In the load script editor the needed script is as therefore like this:

As this examples requires a list of colleagues to choose from we also include a table with the list of initials that each user can choose to tag:

If you already have the relevant persons in an existing table in your app you naturally don't need to create this data island. Then you will just select that specific field when you do the setup in Komment.

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2. Setup Komment™ on the sheet

Your users want a table where they can easily input their comments and see what other colleagues are writing. As we have already prepared the Comments table it is very easy to do. However, keep in mind that this is just an example - you can add as many parts to the table as you like. We select Comments as the Fact Table and the Widgets are setup as shown below:

ID: Readonly (marked as KommentKey)

Comment: Text (Multiple lines set to 5)

Relevant Colleagues (field=Notify): Dropdown (Multiple select)

Time of update: Expression (using auto generated createdBy field)

Updated by: Expression (using auto generated createdAt field)

As we only want users to be able to add new comments and not edit existing ones, we hide the Save button and include an Add button:

3. Go on and collaborate

Now you are good to go! You have a collaboration table right next to the chart you are analyzing and you can easily add new comments and updates:

You might think that this table take up way too much space on the sheet. One option is naturally to minimize the object and let the user expand it when needed. However, you can also switch the table into a popup that you the users can activate when needed:

When the popup is activated by the user they will get a form shown where they can add their comments. You can take a look at the below GIF to see how it works both when using the table and when using the popup:

The end

If you like what you have seen please get in touch and I am happy to provide you with the sample application. You can of course also get a free trial version of Komment so you can make the most of the application. You can use one of the contact forms on our site or you can send us a mail on info@extendbi.com.