Master Data Management

I attended this morning an Interactive Theater session with Rajesh Patel (Program Manager) and John McAllister (Principal Program Manager) from the Master Data Management (MDM) team at Microsoft. I've been following MDM on and off for the last year or so, after I got to see Roger Wolter present on MDM at TechEd 2007, but there hasn't been a lot of news to follow. So when I saw this session on the schedule I knew I had to attend.

The session itself was great - John and Rajesh came in with a slide deck and an agenda, but when they learned (following a show of hands from the audience) that the people in attendance wanted something different, they basically threw away the slides and gave us exactly what we asked for, and it was lots of fun.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of new information that I hadn't heard before (although it was great to hear it again from the people who are building the software), but there were a few gems that I picked up:

• Microsoft MDM will ship as part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) in the next release of Office - Office 14. It will be a shared service in MOSS and the admin and data steward UI will be presented through the MOSS portal.
• The MDM team is definitely thinking about the synergy between MDM and BI. I didn't come away from the session with a really clear story in my mind about how (for example) an SSAS dimension would relate to an MDM hierarchy, but I attribute that vagueness to the poor acoustics rather than to a vague vision on the part of the presenters.
• There is a technology preview version of MDM that is available today. You can email mdmvibe@microsoft.com and request access to the software. The bits you will get will be the same Stratature software that Microsoft acquired a year or so ago, but if you want to start working to see how MDM will fit into your BI solution or into your enterprise, it's a great opportunity to get a head start.

Now I wonder what other tidbits I'll pick up this week...