You need consistent, reliable data. You want data that you can trust.

This is usually data about your transactions, slowly changing data that multiple stakeholders need. This is not necessarily the traditional definition of MDM, but MS sees as master data as something that is important. This isn’t a great session in terms of presentation, but it’s an interesting idea to examine and consider.

Why do we need an MDM solution? I’ve never felt I had a need in the operational world. Often it’s because you have simple apps that help you handle data, but it might not work, or your ETL solutions are expensive. They don’t work well. Or you can’t actually get the data from your warehouse. Or maybe you can’t alter your line of business solutions (ERP, CRM, etc.) can’t change to add new attributes or sections of data.

You are probably using MDM right now, but perhaps it’s distributed into multiple solutions. Sharepoint lists, Excel, Access, etc. The MDM services here are not built into a single technology, and you will need other technologies to work with the master data and ensure that it moves to the places where it is needed.

One key thing to keep in mind is that building an MDM solution ought to be a multi-pass solution. Don’t try to solve everything at once. Implement it in phases, and grow it as you can.

How does MDS work?

There is nothing magic here, and it can be solved with a SQL database. This MDS has it’s own database, with security to allow you to segregate data to certain users. It has all the features of SQL Server, so it can easily integrate with other SQL applications, and there is an WCF API.

It helps you enforce process with a UI for business users as well as handling simple business rules among the data. It also allows you to send notifications/alerts or start Sharepoint workflows.

The demo in this session essentially showed a basic model that is almost like building a small database yourself. You built entities, link them, add attributes, just like you might for any other database model. In some sense, what you’re doing here, apparently, is building the model for your lookup data, and then making sure that all other systems/applications work with this “master data” for themselves.

It seems like it might be something you can use, but I wonder whether this provides a better framework than what you might build. There are definitely some time saving features in here that make it easy to enforce some business rules.