SharePoint vNext and/or Office 14 - Master Data Management!

June 7th 2007 - Microsoft announced merger of data management company, Stratature. Stratature was bought for its flagship product, Enterprise Dimension Manager (+EDM), which had growing customers base in a vertical which is quite new to the "connected enterprise". Post merger, Microsoft pulled off +EDM from the market and continued support to existing customers. +EDM was a new category of product line, which company defines as Master Data Management vertical.

Since then Microsoft has created a new MDM site. Notably it hierarchically sits under SharePoint parent site. This project is code-named "Bulldog". Details on site indicate that it will be included as part of SharePoint 2009 initially, and later as part of Office 14. However, it is not clear, as of now, if it is going to be part of existing SKU or a new one! So what is Master Data in first place? I tried exploring...

What is Master Data Management?

Enterprise initiatives related to compliance, SOA, and even SaaS have resulted in need for defining business entities that have life-span that lives beyond that of transactional one. For example, in a retail firm the entities like Customers and Products would be examples of data that business wants to unique define and share across systems, while an Order would be transactional data. As per the definitions I'm discovering, such entities like Product SKU and/or Customer are Master Data that disparate systems use/re-use, whether tightly or loosely coupled for their connectedness. In other words, I discover that Master Data is "noun", while Transactional data is mostly "verb".

Below is what I found as formal definitions:

"MDM, or master data management, can be described by the way that master data interacts with other data. Master data can be described by the way that it is created, read, updated, deleted, and searched. For example, in transaction systems, master data is almost always involved with transactional data. A customer buys a product. A vendor sells a part, and a partner delivers a crate of materials to a location. An employee is hierarchically related to their manager, who reports up through a manager (another employee). A product may be a part of multiple hierarchies describing their placement within a store. This relationship between master data and transactional data may be fundamentally viewed as a noun/verb relationship. Transactional data capture the verbs, such as sale, delivery, purchase, email, and revocation; master data are the nouns. This is the same relationship data-warehouse facts and dimensions share." - Frequently Asked Questions

Another good and understandable perspective:

"There are essentially five types of data in corporations:

  • Unstructured—This is data found in e-mail, white papers like this, magazine articles, corporate intranet portals, product specifications, marketing collateral, and PDF files.
  • Transactional—This is data related to sales, deliveries, invoices, trouble tickets, claims, and other monetary and non-monetary interactions.
  • Metadata—This is data about other data and may reside in a formal repository or in various other forms such as XML documents, report definitions, column descriptions in a database, log files, connections, and configuration files.
  • Hierarchical—Hierarchical data stores the relationships between other data. It may be stored as part of an accounting system or separately as descriptions of real-world relationships, such as company organizational structures or product lines. Hierarchical data is sometimes considered a super MDM domain, because it is critical to understanding and sometimes discovering the relationships between master data.
  • Master—Master data are the critical nouns of a business and fall generally into four groupings: people, things, places, and concepts. Further categorizations within those groupings are called subject areas, domain areas, or entity types. For example, within people, there are customer, employee, and salesperson. Within things, there are product, part, store, and asset. Within concepts, there are things like contract, warrantee, and licenses. Finally, within places, there are office locations and geographic divisions. Some of these domain areas may be further divided. Customer may be further segmented, based on incentives and history. A company may have normal customers, as well as premiere and executive customers. Product may be further segmented by sector and industry. The requirements, life cycle, and CRUD cycle for a product in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) sector is likely very different from those of the clothing industry. The granularity of domains is essentially determined by the magnitude of differences between the attributes of the entities within them." - MDM Overview

How is it related to SharePoint/Office?

Systems and Processes required for managing Master Data, form Master Data Management. This is the challenge that SharePoint/Office has taken over for next/future releases. It is imperative that widening foot-hold of SharePoint, along with its Workflow stack, made it a natural choice for MD manageability. It excites me as technologist as well as worries me for the challenges that will come along to its right adoption. It remains to be seen how widespread would MDM's need across industry vertical types.

Microsoft has announced MDM Roadmap that states that code-name "bulldog" will span across SharePoint, Office, SQL Server and others like Dynamics, PerformancePoint etc. Roadmap states, "Bulldog will install as part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server".

As per Roadmap, TAP is underway already. Hence CTP shouldn't be far, and seems to be planned for Q3, 2008.

Additional Resources

My quest to figure MDM continues, meantime here are some interesting links...

Hope above is a good jump-start for MDM starters...

-- Sharad

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