If you’re already familiar with Ardoq then you’ll recognize a lot of the features in Ardoq Discover. We’ve long had the ambition of making the power and insight of our core application available to a much wider audience.

While Surveys and Presentations are powerful tools for engaging with your wider organization, their ability to enable your stakeholders to explore and self-serve insight is limited.

This is where Ardoq Discover comes in.

We recognized that to enable the wider organization to self-serve their own needs, we would have to considerably simplify the user experience (UX). In many cases we’ve done this by removing function, meaning Ardoq Discover is a simpler but also less powerful application than core Ardoq in terms of number of features and user flexibility.

We’ve also done this by changing some core aspects of the way the application works. This means that existing users of the core Ardoq application will find some key differences when using Ardoq Discover.

Here’s a quick rundown of the key differences between Ardoq Discover and core Ardoq.

Open core Ardoq and the first thing you’ll see is the asset management page with all your folders, workspaces, presentations, scenarios, and more. You’ll also see a search bar at the top of the page. If you open one of your workspaces, you’ll see the workspace view with the navigator bar on the left showing your component hierarchy and your views in the main part of the screen.

For Ardoq Discover, a single search bar replaces the Search Bar, asset management page, and workspace navigator you are used to in core Ardoq. Keyword search is supported in the main search bar input, and the folder/workspace/component hierarchy structure can be navigated by clicking on the “browse” button.

You can also do a filtered search by navigating part-way down the hierarchy and clicking on the “Search here” icon. This will restrict your keyword search to specific folders or workspaces.

Please note that you can only search or browse for components in Ardoq Discover. Other assets like Surveys, Dashboards, Presentations, or Scenarios are not supported.

Learn more about features available to the Ardoq Discover users and admins in this article.

One of the biggest differences between Ardoq Discover and the core application is that Ardoq Discover only uses workspaces in very limited situations.

In Ardoq Discover you don’t open whole workspaces in the same way as in core Ardoq, or use them to drive access permissions. Both views and their permissions in Ardoq Discover cross workspaces by default.

Why make this change? It comes down to two fundamental factors: The first is the need to limit the amount of data loaded into the UI. This has both performance and usability benefits since by default Ardoq Discover typically loads fewer data in response to a user action.

The second is that we’re targeting Ardoq Discover at users who are less likely to need to visualize a whole portfolio at once (e.g. every application in an application workspace) and more likely to want to see targeted views based on their particular area of interest or responsibility. In other words, Ardoq Discover helps to answer role-specific questions by presenting a specific set of data.

The result is that visualizing groups or collections of things depends on building connections between them and other components which can be used as groupings. In the example of those applications, we might want to group them by the department who owns them, the person who’s an expert in them, the business capability they realize, and the business process they support.

Although most of the views in core Ardoq are graphical, there are textual ways to view your data as well - most commonly the Details Page and Table View.

In Ardoq Discover, the Details page is replaced by the contextual sidebar which displays the selected component’s description, properties, tags, and more. Unlike the Details Page, references are not shown.

There is no equivalent to Table View in Ardoq Discover. As above, Ardoq Discover is not designed to be used to visualize whole portfolios of component types, rather it focuses on allowing you to drill down and explore on a component-by-component basis.

Viewpoints are another big difference from core Ardoq. For existing Ardoq users coming to Ardoq Discover, you can think of Viewpoints as "super Perspectives" that combine elements of Perspectives, View Modifiers, Quick Filters, and Graph Filters as well as the View menu.

Viewpoints are meant to make it easier for end-user to visualize their data by simplifying the decision-making and configuration process. It does this by using pre-configured data selection and formatting rules along with a specified view style. You can find more detailed information about Viewpoints here.

Viewpoints can be selected from a dropdown menu at the top of the Details Page and can be accessed from any component whose type is included in the Viewpoint definition. This means that a Viewpoint that maps applications to business processes can be accessed via any application or business process, giving a huge number of possible visualizations.

With the introduction of the contextual sidebar in Ardoq Discover’s Details Page, we’ve changed the click interaction with Ardoq’s data visualizations. In the core application, single-clicking on a component in visualization will cause the visualization to recontextualize (i.e. re-draw itself centering on the selected component).

In Ardoq Discover, single-clicking on a component will not cause the visualization to recontextualise but instead will allow you to preview the selected component’s details in the sidebar. This enables users to see details for each component in a ‘static’ picture. Users can then choose to recontexualise either by double-clicking on a component or by using the “Center view on this” control next to the component’s name.

The last main change between core Ardoq and Ardoq Discover is the permissions model. In core Ardoq permissions are primarily determined by Workspace; in Ardoq Discover, permissions are allocated to Viewpoints. For example, if a person or group is given access to a Viewpoint, then they can see all component types in that viewpoint even if these sit in different workspaces.

These Viewpoint permissions are also used to dictate the search permission for Ardoq Discover’s search bar. In other words, if you have read permissions to five Viewpoints, then you can search for any of the component types included in those five Viewpoints.

Find out more about working with permissions in Ardoq Discover.

Finally, it should be stressed that Viewpoint permissions are separate from Survey permissions. Viewpoint permissions only enable you to search and view the information in Ardoq Discover. To edit the information you will need Survey permissions as well.