Profisee 2024 R2 Release Review

Native MDM Workload in Microsoft Fabric

Do you use or know what is Microsoft Fabric? It is a unified data platform designed to simplify and streamline data management, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) workflows.

The new release enables Microsoft Fabric and Profisee MDM (SaaS workload) users to manage master data directly within Fabric, streamlining the creation of Master Data Products and enhancing analytics workflows.

Why is this important? While Fabric integrates data from various sources, its true value is unlocked when the data is fully prepared and ready for use (often called Gold Medallion data). By embedding MDM within Fabric, users can transform fragmented data into high quality, unified information, ensuring it is ready for analytics, AI, and decision making.

Let us take a look at how it appears on your Microsoft Data Fabric homepage.

Enabling the Profisee workload option in your Fabric tenant will activate Profisee capabilities within your Fabric environment.

Once your Profisee workload has been activated, you can commence creation of a new Master Data Product within Fabric.

Connecting to your Profisee instance is as easy as putting in your Profisee instance URL.

Once connected, you can view model entities – whether new or existing via the REST API – within Fabric, similar to how you would in the Profisee front-end. It offers a Fabric-like data stewardship experience.

Just like the Profisee front-end, you can open and update records and see data quality rules in the first column (green icons for success, red icons for failures). Pretty powerful, right?

Any changes made in the Fabric front-end will be reflected in the corresponding entity. For example, changing the customer type of a record in Fabric will update the record in the Profisee portal as well.

Future releases will introduce the ability to create data quality rules and matching strategies.

Automate MDM with Profisee AI Assistant

Since 2023 R2, there were two AI assistants introduced in the release such as the Natural Language for Filtering to dynamic building the filter for you and the ability to structure “unstructured” data.

For 2024 R2, we are seeing a new AI assistant to help with your data mapping. Strategies in Connect can now automatically map requests to their proper attributes using the Auto Assign feature. The Open AI-powered Attribute Assistant allows users to enter plain-text prompts to perform data mapping instantly and automatically. Users who already have an Open AI compatible instance have access to this feature without any additional configuration.

When should you use this feature?

If you are configuring integrations in Connect, defining the source-to-target mapping can be time consuming. The new AI assistant helps by suggesting integration mappings, doing the heavy lifting for you. While I have not tried it yet, I am looking forward to giving it a go.

Profisee AI Assistants will become a key feature going forward, offering new automation capabilities to streamline MDM tasks.

Purview Data Product Association

With this release, Profisee strengthens its integration with Microsoft Purview, allowing users to link Profisee Data Products with Purview Data Products.

This integration enhances collaboration and alignment between tools, automatically connecting Profisee artifacts with their corresponding entities in Purview. Once again, Profisee is focused on improving collaboration and integration with partner tools.

Data Products can be selected from the All-Data Products field in the top-left corner of the Administration area in Profisee Portal. You can also create a new data product by clicking Add new at the bottom of the list of available Data Products.

Let us walk through a real example. Once you have linked your Profisee instance to your Purview instance, you should be able to view the data products that show the association between your Profisee and Purview entities.

Clicking the ‘Open in Purview’ button in the top-right corner of the dialog will take you to the respective data product within Purview, as shown below. Here, you will also see two Profisee-associated ‘Data Assets.’

Additional Enhancements

The 2024 R2 release also brings several improvements to enhance performance, refine the user interface, and offer advanced analytics, helping users gain deeper insights into their data and processes.

Create, Edit, and Delete Entities and Attributes from the Portal

Profisee admins can now perform basic data modeling directly within the Profisee Portal, eliminating the need for FastApp Studio. They can create entities from the Data Browser and edit attributes from any entity grid. These changes are saved across the platform and function the same way as those made in FastApp Studio.

This is a feature I’ve been hoping for, for quite some time. It’s great to see that we can now do more from the Portal front-end.

Another useful enhancement is the enhanced ‘View and Navigate a Hierarchy’ feature. I have always felt that the hierarchy feature needed a lot more work — it was easy to navigate but lacked customisation. However, this release shows significant improvements, particularly in the navigation UI and UX, marking a big step forward.

Clicking an item will expand the list if there are additional branches beneath it. If the item is a root-level entry, it will open a form displaying the selected record. The hierarchy list remains open, but you can collapse branches by clicking their icons again.

Once a root-level item is selected, the form allows you to view, add, edit, or remove records, depending on the configuration of the hierarchy.

Regardless of whether the tree is collapsed, you can navigate your selected branch using the breadcrumbs at the top left of the list. Clicking the arrow next to the breadcrumb bubble reveals a dropdown menu with each level within the branch. Selecting any item from the list will expand the tree to that level.

Alternatively, clicking the breadcrumb bubble directly will immediately take you back to the last level in the branch.