Multi-user Knime Environment Setup - New to Knime

Hi Everyone,

I’m brand new to Knime and have only installed the local analytics platform and reviewed some of the demo content. It seems very promising for my team.

I have a question about using it in a multi-user environment. I have 5 analysts that need to build workflows, but I don’t want them running on their local machine. I would rather they run on a server, so that if a computer is off or they are out on vacation, it won’t stop the workflow. The other reason is I want to see all the workflows and if they are failing.

I assume most of you will say, you need to buy the server edition, but I’m just trying to explore the tool. If it works really well for us, I would definitely invest in the server edition.

So does anyone have any recommended “workflows” for multi-user environment?

Hi @Austin

if this helps, we do offer free trial periods of our KNIME Server. Just shoot us an EMail to sales@knime.com and we give you a trial licence and help you set everything up.

Best, Iris

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As a server customer (not me personally, my employer!), I would certainly recommend taking up the offer of a free trial! Before you do so, it is probably worth spending a bit of effort setting up some workflows doing the sorts of things you want to do, and e.g. Using wrapped metanodes to try out some of the interactive quickforms and JavaScript-based views of they are relevant to you, along with the BIRT report generator part of Knime if that is useful to you.

I know people have tried alternative routes, for example using a software repository e.g. Git, in which case have a read of Using git (or another revision control system) for KNIME workflows, it does work but you don’t have a lot of the nice features of the server, e.g webportal, scheduling and ability to examine running or compete jobs to check their status or see why they failed if that happens.
Steve

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KNIME uses Eclipse as platform, therefore we can use Eclipse multi user capabilities.
In this link Eclipse multi-user installs you’ll find a detailed description on how to configure Eclipse in a machine where multiple users can login and use Eclipse. This applies to KNIME as well.

Shortly described, a person with admin rights performs an installation on the machine, launch once KNIME after the installation and complete configurations in File > Preferences that apply to all users. In my case, for example, our machine is behind a firewall, so we configured KNIME to update from a local zipped site.
Then the administrator closes KNIME and make sure all real users has read-only access to the installation folder.
As an user logins to the machine and starts KNIME, it will create an user’s specific configuration folder under $HOME.eclipse

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