Have Data Will Travel

MDM - Scaling Out Matching

2009-02-23T19:48:00Z

MDM - Scaling Out Matching It’s been a long time since my last post but I’ve been pretty busy figuring out how IT works. As you might expect, one of the hardest things has been learning all the new acronyms. Not only that but some of the acronyms I thought I knew mean different things in IT than they did in the product groups. For example, I thought OBA meant “Office Business Application” and found out it means “On Boarding Application” only after several weeks of confusion. My current challenge...(read more)

Changes

2008-08-29T20:32:00Z

Changes This isn’t one of my more typical technical posts so if you’re looking for profound technical insights you can skip the rest of this. This summer I went through a career change that will probably impact what I blog about so I thought I should share it with my readers. As many of you know, I was one of the original members of the Microsoft MDM product team. Early this summer I was (in the words of my favorite euphemism) made redundant on the MDM product team. After a number of panicky weeks...(read more)

New Master Data Management White Paper Series

2008-07-20T04:38:00Z

New Master Data Management White Paper Series My friend Tyler Graham is writing a series of white papers on the practical aspects of implementing an MDM system. The first three are available here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc505992(TechNet.10).aspx Tyler came to Microsoft as part of the Stratature acquisition so he has a lot of experience in implementing MDM systems at Stratature customers. That means these papers are full of practical advice instead of the high-level theory often...(read more)

Choosing MDM Hub styles

2008-05-28T02:01:00Z

Choosing MDM Hub styles A couple weeks ago, someone asked me how to choose which MDM hub style would work best for an application. I thought I had covered this in one of my white papers but I couldn’t find a good reference to give him so I thought I would write up something here. To review what I’ve cover elsewhere, there are basic three types of MDM hubs: · Registry – the hub doesn’t contain the actual master data. It contains links to where the master data exists in the source systems. In most...(read more)

Post Mortems

2008-02-02T00:40:00Z

One of my pet peeves is that after we ship something we normally have a Post Mortem meeting to discuss what we should learn from the experience. I'm not against the meeting. I think they're great and we learn a lot. Sometimes we even have pizza! What bugs me is the name Post Mortem. This suggests something just died and we're getting together to figure out why. Come on! We just shipped a great product that we spent years of our life developing. Nothing died - something was born! After our next release,...(read more)

Master Data is not Metadata

2008-01-29T09:32:00Z

Master Data is not Metadata I regularly get emails from people asking about the Microsoft Metadata story. While I assume that’s mainly confusion over the MDM acronym which could reasonably be interpreted as Metadata Management as well as Master Data Management, there’s also enough overlap between Master Data and Metadata to lead to confusion. It turns out I’m uniquely qualified to comment on Master Data vs. Metadata. I spent a few years in the early 90’s building one of the early metadata repositories....(read more)

Master Data Management Philosophy

2007-11-20T08:01:00Z

Master Data Management Philosophy Last week I did a presentation that included a slide on my philosophy for MDM so I decided to expand that slide into a blog post. While this is my philosophy, I think it comes pretty close to the way the rest of the MDM product team looks at MDM. As always, I welcome any comments and feedback. • Multi-domain hub – while there are definite advantages to specialized MDM applications that handle data quality, match-merge, and standardization for a particular type of...(read more)

New Microsoft MDM Web Site

2007-09-24T18:29:00Z

Check out the new Microsoft MDM web site: http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/mdm/default.mspx...(read more)

Gartner MDM Conference

2007-09-24T18:27:00Z

Gartner MDM Conference I just got back from the Gartner MDM Conference. I learned a lot and had the chance to talk to a lot of people about MDM and what they are doing in their organizations. Maybe it was because of the sample I happened to talk to but it seems like a lot of people are interested in MDM but not a lot of them have projects in place. I assume that’s an indication of the state of the MDM industry – while some people have been doing MDM for several years, the mainstream is just now feeling...(read more)

Analytical and Transactional MDM

2007-07-27T08:40:00Z

Analytical and Transactional MDM I was talking to someone about Analytical and Transactional MDM recently and we realized that while there are quite a few conceptual differences between the two, there’s a significant amount of overlap in the implementation details. For my purposes, I’ll define Analytical MDM as the processes and tools to manage the dimensions in a data warehouse or OLAP cube and Transactional MDM as the processes and tools to manage the master data used in transactional systems....(read more)

Stratature Misinformation

2007-06-28T02:15:00Z

Stratature Misinformation Do you remember the “telephone” game we used to play in school where you line a bunch of people up in a row and whisper something to the first person in line who whispers it to the next one, etc. and the last person repeats what they heard. This is usually hilarious – “return of the Jedi” comes out as “Jeni has pink-eye”. As someone on the inside of the Stratature MDM acquisition, I often marvel at how our plans an commitments have gotten distorted as they made their way...(read more)

Master Data Management, Microsoft, and Stratature

2007-06-12T01:20:00Z

Master Data Management, Microsoft, and Stratature If you’re a regular reader, you are aware that I have been blogging about MDM for about a year now. I’m very excited by the news that Microsoft acquired Stratature last week for two reasons – I think it’s a great move for Microsoft and it means that I am now the second employee on the Microsoft MDM team. We picked up a great team with many years of MDM experience in the Stratature team so we already have a solid MDM product team in place and we’re...(read more)

Master Data Management at TechEd

2007-05-25T00:47:00Z

Master Data Management at TechEd I notice that no MDM sessions made it into the TechEd schedule this year. If you’re a regular reader, you know that MDM is my current passion. If you’re interested in MDM, I would love to talk to you at the Architecture Track lounge at TechEd. I haven’t totally forgotten Service Broker so if you’re interested in Service Broker, I would love to talk also....(read more)

Windows WF on SQL Service Broker

2007-05-21T17:43:00Z

Windows WF on SQL Service Broker From the time we first started working on the Service Broker programming models five or six years ago, it was obvious that most SSB programs end up looking a lot like a workflow. Messages come in and the application processes them often sending out more messages to other services. When the application is waiting for a response from a message, the state of the application is stored so that it doesn’t have to be kept around if it takes a long time for the response to...(read more)

MDM Hub Architecture White Paper

2007-04-16T16:58:00Z

MDM Hub Architecture White Paper I took my MDM Hub Architecture series of posts, cleaned them up and combined them into a white paper that was just published on MSDN: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410798.aspx...(read more)