How can SharePoint be made better? Ask the people working on Bulldog. The team behind it belong to a data management firm you may not have heard of, but their product was so good that Microsoft acquired them lock, stock and barrel. So what can we look forward to seeing? Keep reading.
Contributed by Joe Eitel Rating: / 4 March 02, 2009
Microsoft, whose programs have literally changed the way that people work and revolutionized what consumers are capable of doing on their PCs, has decided to enter the vast and competitive world of master data management thanks to their acquisition of an Atlanta-based master data management firm named Stratature. The product will be released to coincide with the next release of Office and will install as part of SharePoint.
The product, currently being developed, has been nicknamed “Bulldog.” It has been reported that the development team is working with many Microsoft products, such as PPS, Dynamics, SharePoint, Excel and more to integrate the master data hub with those products. The stated goal is to have Bulldog remain almost identical to the Stratature +EDM product, with several enhancements aimed at improving the experience.
Stratature’s former website, which now directs viewers to a Microsoft site, proudly proclaims the fact that the master data management company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft and says the merger represents a culmination of a company-wide effort across the SQL Server, Business Intelligence and SharePoint groups to deliver on a unified Master Data Management solution to improve information management initiatives. Let’s take a look at the specifics of Microsoft SharePoint and how Bulldog is going to integrate seamlessly into a program that already seems to have it all.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a server program that is part of the Microsoft Office system. Users can utilize Office SharePoint to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. Users can also create SharePoint sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management or business intelligence needs. The software also allows you to conduct effective searches, documents and data, participate in forms-driven business processes and access and analyze large amounts of business data. Thanks to Bulldog, consumers will now be able to manage data like never before.
Microsoft Office 14 has a release date of fall 2009 and it will come equipped with Bulldog, though it is still unclear if it will install as a standalone application or as part of the Microsoft Office SharePoint server installations. This much is clear: Microsoft believes users need to get an accurate view of their business via authoritative data delivered in a manner that reflects the unique ways in which they manage their operations. The software giant recognized Stratature as a leader in the MDM market and valued the company’s experience, products and services it provided. It is the company’s hope that with Stratature, Microsoft can now offer increased capabilities as an integral part of Microsoft Office System applications and servers.
Some may be wondering why a technology company as powerful, influential and successful as Microsoft decided to purchase Stratature rather than building a Master Data Management (MDM) system of their own from scratch. According to Stratature, it’s as simple as the two companies having a similar philosophy as to how information should be managed. Plus, Microsoft already has a somewhat generic MDM solution in place with their Performance Point technology, which allows for powerful hierarchy management capabilities, flexible data models, granular security models, data stewardship capabilities and human workflows. The acquisition will only further strengthen the structure and accelerate Microsoft’s delivery of technology in the MDM market, allowing the technology giant to build on the relationship already established between itself and Stratature.
The first delivery of MDM-related technology from Microsoft will focus on analytical hierarchy management. This functionality will help business executives obtain information in a way that accurately reflects their own view of their departments, while simplifying the job of business analysts via the reuse of existing data hierarchies and the creation of custom ones. The solution will also help IT staff provide application developers with a single source of authoritative data to simplify data integration and development tasks, while helping IT executives retain control and governance over corporate information.
It’s impossible to have a firm grasp of all of the features that Bulldog will include in conjunction with Microsoft SharePoint, especially because the product has yet to be officially released and a limited technology preview wasn't yet out at the time of this writing. Before features can even be discussed, though, it’s important to have an understanding of what Bulldog will do, especially in respect to hierarchies.
Essentially, master data contains a wide variety of hierarchies. The roll-up hierarchies for accounts in a chart of accounts, the reporting hierarchy for employees, the organizational structure of a customer’s business and categories of items in an item master are typical examples of hierarchies. These hierarchies are often hard coded into business systems or defined in a number of Excel spreadsheets.
Hierarchies can be defined by attribute relationships. For example, city belongs to state and state belongs to region. These derived hierarchy relationships change whenever an attribute value changes. Hierarchies can also be defined as parent-child relationships that may have an arbitrary depth along any path.
The Stratature solution allows both types of hierarchies to be leveraged into a new, derived hierarchy. The advantage of reuse is that it ensures that there is only one definition of the relationship at any point in time. There is also extensive support for Business rules, workflow, flexible data models, etc.
Though we may not know specific features, thanks to a product development map featured on Microsoft’s website, consumers can have an idea of what Bulldog will be capable of doing for the home user. Like other MDM products, Bulldog aims to create a centralized data source and keep it synchronized, thus reducing redundancies across all applications that process the data. With this aim, Bulldog integrates with end user applications like Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Sharing the architectural core with Stratature, Bulldog uses a Microsoft SQL Server database as the physical data store. It is a part of the Master Data Hub, which uses the database to store and manage data entities and allows users to validate and manage the data and keep it synchronized with other systems that use the data. The master data hub has to extract the data from the source system, validate, sanitize and shape the data, remove duplicates and update the hub repositories, as well as synchronize the external sources.
The entity schemas, attributes, data hierarchies, validation rules and access control information are specified as metadata to the Bulldog runtime. Bulldog does not impose any limitation on the data model. Bulldog also allows custom business rules, which are used to validate and sanitize the data entering the data hub, which is then run against the data matching the specified criteria.
All changes made to the data are validated against the rules and a log of the transaction is stored persistently. Violations are logged separately and optionally, the owner can be notified immediately. Also, all the data entities can be revised by the owner or operator of the system.
As stated previously, Bulldog allows the master data to be categorized by hierarchical relationships, such as employee data - which is a subtype of organization data. Hierarchies are generated by relating data attributes. Data can be automatically categorized using rules, and the categories are introspected programmatically. Bulldog can also expose the data as Microsoft SQL Server views, which can be pulled by any SQL-compatible client. It uses a role-based access control system to restrict access to the data. The views are generated dynamically, so they contain the latest data entities in the master hub.
Bulldog will also be able to push out the data by writing to external journals. Bulldog also includes a web-based UI for viewing and managing the data; utilizing AJAX in the front-end and ASP.NET in the back-end.
Bulldog will also include certain features not available in the Stratature product. It will gain a Web service interface to expose the data, as well as an API, which internally uses the exposed web services and exposes the feature set programmatically to access and manipulate the data. Bulldog will also integrate with Active Directory for authentication purposes. Unlike Stratature, Bulldog will support Unicode characters as well as multilingual user interfaces.
Conclusion
The acquisition of Stratature has led to a very new and exciting time for Microsoft. Entering the world of Master Data Management will enable Microsoft to reach a wider audience and please an even vaster array of people, but what does it mean for Stratature? Aside from now being completely owned by Microsoft, all former Stratature products have been taken off the market and efforts are currently underway to best integrate all of the company’s past technological products and achievements with the Microsoft Office product line in order to maximize customer value while reducing overlap and potential confusion.
Microsoft has vowed to integrate much of Stratature’s technology into its product offerings and seems committed to providing its partners the best opportunities to offer products and services to customers that integrate data management across the enterprise. Whether or not consumers will quickly take to Microsoft’s new endeavor will have to be seen.
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