We know that Microsoft’s new master data management (MDM) product, codenamed ‘Bulldog‘, will ship with the next version of SharePoint Portal Server, although so far there have been no clues as to exactly what form it will take. It seems like MDM is a term that we may become more familiar with in the near future – the Master Data Management Roadmap mentions that:
“MDM will be integrated with the core Microsoft Office Business Platform suite of applications such as PerformancePoint, Dynamics, Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as well as key third party applications.”
That’s all fine and well, but the question most people will likely ask when reading this is, “What exactly is master data management?”
In a nutshell, master data management is about bringing together an organization’s disparate data stores. A typical organization may have a support system, an ERP system, a CRM system, a sales & marketing database, a product database etc. and the goal of MDM is to consolidate all of this data (and associated metadata) so that it can be viewed, managed and searched from a central and secure location. Wikipedia notes that, “Bulldog aims to create a centralized data source and keep it synchronized, and thus reduce redundancies, across the applications which process the data.”
There is a hell of a lot more to MDM than the brief description above so if you’re interested, read the MDM overview, or browse some of the articles on Microsoft’s MDM site.
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