Persona Insight - Getting Started and Upgrade Procedure
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Version 6.30
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The Persona Insights Library Pack is a turnkey solution allowing you to measure activity across a range of technical and sentiment based areas so that you can build an understanding of the behaviors of Employees as they go about their daily work.
The pack is slightly different to other Nexthink Library Packs in that it is essentially a framework of measurements that enables you solve a multitude of Business requirements. By importing and running the pack, you will discover the Persona-based activities of your Employees - but in fact it is what you do with this information that will provide you with the real power and functionality that the pack brings.
Before installing the Persona Insights Library Pack, for on-premise customers you must be on Version 6.29 of Nexthink, and you must have installed the version 2.1 or greater. This requirement is automatically fulfilled for Cloud customers whose platform will always be the latest release.
The Persona Insight pack also uses a new feature, Focus Time, which once enabled, is a data point that is collected to show the usage of applications (i.e. time of the focused window being used). This is documented for reference in the .
The Focus Time Monitoring feature is available for Windows clients from Version 6.29 of Nexthink and for macOS clients from Version 6.30.
Please note that this feature is disabled by default in both operating systems. Should you wish to enable this feature across your Collector estate please use the necessary script delivery tools to configure it across all Collectors. Note that if you are licensed for Act, you can also set this flag with the remote action Set Collector Configuration which is available from the .
Manual configuration - Windows: To enable this feature manually, you will need to create the following registry key on each Collector where you want it monitored:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Nexthink\Collector\WindowFocusTimeMonitoring Also add a DWORD value named “Enabled” which will have to be set to 1.
Manual configuration - macOS: To enable this feature manually, a config.json file can be provided by Nexthink.
Before you start working on this pack and customizing it, please take some time to familiarize yourself with the different components of this pack and how they work together.
Persona Insights has two main dashboards out of the box, the Persona Traits Insight and the Digital Experience by Trait Dashboards.
The Metrics that underpin these dashboards simply look for the Persona Trait with a value greater than 6.
One metric “Multiple Device Consumer” has a threshold of 5 in order that the use of 2 or more devices is reported.
The Persona Insight pack comes with Metrics to represent all the Persona traits and their current Digital Experience Score in the scores that come with the pack. Unless all of these Traits are required Nexthink recommends removing metrics that are not needed.
Persona Insights uses two Scores, Persona Traits and Persona Advanced Traits.
Each score contains a core set of Traits being measured
Persona Traits – contains the individual Traits plus the parent overall trait, so for example one measures usage of Teams, while the parent measures usage of Collaboration Tools. Please be aware of how the parent or composite score operates. Whilst you can reference a composite score via a metric or Investigation the default behavior is for it to show the maximum value of the leaf scores below it, and not their combined usage, which might have been the desired result. For certain groupings; Collaboration Tools, Productivity Tools and File Sharing Tools, a summary Persona Trait Score referencing a summary category has been created to get around this issue and to show the true summation of the individual scores.
Persona Traits Advanced – this Score summarizes the responses to the Pulse Survey Campaign included with the full version of this pack and therefore relates to employee sentiment (and in the future to remote action based Traits). The same rules apply to this as with the above Persona Traits score.
Note that the scores look for the activity over the past seven days, and that the thresholds that have been set should be tuned according to the actual data transfer values you see within your Organization. These thresholds have already been customized to a certain extent - the scoring for Excel (Spreadsheet Consumer) is higher than Microsoft Project Consumer, for example, as it is assumed that heavy spreadsheet use will exceed the heavy use of MS Project over the course of a week.
This pack contains a campaign called “Pulse Survey” with 5 measurements:
Responsiveness (to the Campaign itself) Sentiment - “How have you been feeling at work during the past week?” Work Location - “How satisfied are you with your current work location?” Learning and Growth - “How satisfied are you with the learning and growth opportunities at work?” Work-life balance - “How satisified are you with your work-life balance?”
The scored responses to these questions should give you a real feel for the employee sentiment within your organization, and of course a low scored response to a particular subject will give you a clear action point on an issue that should be addressed.
It is important to understand the use of categories in this pack. From version 2.0.0.0, the use of categories was changed significantly so this should be of particular interest to those customers who are familiar with earlier versions of this pack.
The multiple categories included in this pack are used to group types of applications or business tools together to be referenced by the corresponding scores.
All scores concerned with application measurements now contain a direct reference to an entry in a category, rather than the application executable itself. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, should an application change it’s executable name, or a web resource change it’s URL, this can be changed in the category rather than modifying the NXQL query in the score. Secondly, multiple executable names can be listed for the same application, which can now include macOS references.
The pack uses the following Categories:
Persona Insight – All - For certain application groupings there is a need to show usage across all similar applications in summary form. For these summary groups; Collaboration Tools, Productivity Tools and File Sharing Tools, a new category has been created listing all common applications of the type. These summary categories are referenced by three corresponding summary scores.
Persona Insight – Browser Apps - This category contains references to all of the main corporate browsers that may be in use in your organization.
Persona Insight – Binary Compliance – This is used to monitor unwanted activity. One keyword is actively used, “Forbidden Binaries” which is in the “Shadow IT” Persona Trait and this should be configured to match your Organizations need. The other two, “Corporate Browser” and “Malicious Binaries” are present as categories which can be used, if wished, in extending the Scoring to monitor this kind of activity.
Persona Insight – Cloud Storage Tools – This category contains entries for the locally installed client for three popular cloud storage tools; Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
Persona Insight – Collaboration Tools – This category contains entries for many popular collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and WebEx.
Persona Insight – Data Scientist Tools – This category contains entries for popular tools such as Microsoft BI, Tableau and Oracle BI.
Persona Insight – Designer Tools – This category contains entries for both Backend Tools (e.g. Python, Powershell) and Frontend Tools (e.g. Figma, GitHub Desktop).
Persona Insight – Domain Profile – This is used in the score under the “Web Apps” Persona Trait grouping and each item within it, Social Domains, Reference Domains, Business Domains, Learning Domains and Non-Business Domains can be filled appropriately with entries for your Organization.
Persona Insight – Email Client – By default this category contains one entry for an Email Client containing an entry for Microsoft Outlook. This is in recognition of the fact that, whilst popular, Outlook is not always the chosen email client for all organizations. Alternative applications can therefore be listed instead of, or in addition, to this default entry.
Persona Insight – Productivity Tools – By default, this category contains entries for all of the applications in the Microsoft Office suite. The keywords referencing the individual executables are generic however, allowing easy customization of this category with no further changes to the score, metric names, or dashboards required.
To upgrade from the previous version of Persona Insight, a couple of small but important steps have to be followed. You start by installing the pack as usual.
The default behavior suggestion to replace only the metrics is not sufficient, however.
Please expand the Scores and Campaign folders and make sure that they are set to “Replace”, you can now press “Apply”
All being well, the pack should install correctly.
The only other thing to consider is that the pack will have installed itself in a second copy of the dashboard, you can remove or rename the previous dashboard according to your preferences.
