Release Notes | Release 3.0.4

Overview

Welcome to Semarchy Convergence for MDM!
This document provides the latest information about this Semarchy Convergence Release, including new features and bug fixes.

Contents

  1. Release Notes | Release 3.0.4
    1. Overview
    2. Contents
  2. New Features in Version 3.0
    1. Highlights
      1. Redesigned User Experience
      2. Embedded Dashboards - Powered by Pulse
      3. Application Design Enhancements
      4. New and Updated Plug-ins
    2. Other Changes
      1. Design-Time
      2. Administration
      3. Platform
      4. MDM Applications
      5. Plug-ins
  3. Previous Releases
    1. New Features in Version 2.2
      1. Redesigned Master Data Governance Experience
        1. Clarity
        2. Efficiency
        3. Comfort
      2. Interactive and Safe Data Authoring
        1. Interactive Data Augmentation and Validation
        2. Pro-active Duplicates and Unique Keys Detection
        3. Concurrent Change Detection
      3. Design-Time Enhancements
        1. Workflow Design Productivity
        2. Filters on Child Records
        3. Export/Import Models Everywhere
        4. New Plug-in: Text Normalization and Transliteration
      4. Other Changes
        1. Design-Time
        2. Administration
        3. Deployment
    2. New Features in Version 2.1
      1. Overview
      2. Detailed Features
        1. Entity Matching Behavior
        2. Automated ID Generation
        3. Error Processing Workflows
        4. Improved Experience for Data Authoring and Stewardship
        5. Quick Records Check out
        6. Workflow Data Validation
        7. Improved Data Import/Export in Excel and CSV
        8. Retention Policies and Scheduled Purges
    3. New Features in Version 2.0
      1. Major Features
        1. Support for High-Availability Deployment
        2. Display Components
        3. Row-Level Security
        4. Model Variables
        5. Model Documentation
        6. Client API
      2. Other Changes
        1. Administration
        2. Deployment
        3. Integration
  4. Change Log
    1. Version 2.0.1.
    2. Version 2.0.2
    3. Version 2.0.3
    4. Version 2.0.4
    5. Version 2.0.5
    6. Version 2.0.6
    7. Version 2.1.0
    8. Version 2.1.1
    9. Version 2.2.0
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    10. Version 2.2.1
      1. New Features
      2. Bug Fixes
    11. Version 2.2.2
      1. Known Issues
      2. Bug Fixes
    12. Version 2.2.3
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    13. Version 2.2.4
      1. Known Issues
      2. Bug Fixes
    14. Version 3.0.0
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    15. Version 3.0.1
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    16. Version 3.0.2
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    17. Version 3.0.3
      1. Known Issues
      2. New Features
      3. Bug Fixes
    18. Version 3.0.4
      1. Known Issues
      2. Bug Fixes

New Features in Version 3.0

Convergence for MDM 3.0 introduces many new capabilities that expand your ability to manage master and reference data. This release includes a simplified user experience supporting mobile devices, greater control over visual composition for data forms and enhancements to the data models

Highlights

Redesigned User Experience

The user experience in MDM applications has been redesigned in this version from the ground up, to make it more intuitive for business users. By implementing principles such as clickvertizing (only show available actions), single-click and responsive design, we have made this interface simpler to use on every device. By adding dozens of enhancements including breadcrumbs and a new search window. We ensure that you have the power of the platform at your fingertips.

Embedded Dashboards – Powered by Pulse

Pulse Metrics dashboards are automatically embedded in the applications generated for business users and data stewards.
MDM users and data stewards can now access Data Quality, Duplicates, Timeline and Workflow Performance dashboards right from their application.

Application Design Enhancements

This release enables application designers to deliver highly customized MDM applications.

Application designers can now choose the available features (dashboards, lineage, etc.) for the applications, and limit the access to these applications and their features to specified roles.

Form views now support flow and grid layouts to quickly create simple forms or highly complex ones, using a visual composition editor. You can now choose the exact position, sizing, and more, for each attribute and section in a form. Attributes in these forms benefit for a rich palette of display components. You can design forms that will look good on desktop and mobile platforms, without a line of code.

Business object views are enhanced: they support customized labels and display names as well as sort in the hierarchy. You can also explicitly design the reference navigation and selection in business object views.

New and Updated Plug-ins

New built-in plug-ins are added to the platform:

Other Changes

Design-Time

Administration

Platform

MDM Applications

Plug-ins

Previous Releases

New Features in Version 2.2

Semarchy Convergence for MDM 2.2 brings master data governance to the next level by introducing a redesigned user experience with enhanced interactivity.

Redesigned Master Data Governance Experience

Convergence for MDM introduces a redesigned interface for business users and data stewards exercising master data governance.

This user interface is separated from the design-time workbench and provides simplified and powerful access to the master data. It has been enhanced in the following areas:

Clarity

Efficiency

Comfort

With no additional design-time effort, this new simple, fast and elegant interface is available from your Convergence for MDM instance on the /data path.

Interactive and Safe Data Authoring

Convergence for MDM 2.2 adds new benefits for users authoring data in the hub: data entry is made simpler, faster and safer.

Interactive Data Augmentation and Validation

With this feature, developers can define enrichers and validations triggered on workflow tasks and transitions. Resulting workflows deliver more interactivity to the business users and data stewards authoring master data in the hub:

Developers can configure enrichers and validations from the Properties view for tasks and transitions in the Workflow diagram for data entry workflows.

Pro-active Duplicates and Unique Keys Detection

ID Matching entities, frequently used for data authoring patterns, now support duplicate and unique key violation detection within workflows:

When a business user edits a record in a workflow, the interface warns him immediately if he is about to create:

Developers enable duplicate detection on ID Matching Entities by creating Matchers for these entities. Unique key validation is configured as a validation in a workflow task or transition.

Concurrent Change Detection

Data being processed in an activity may become out of sync if the original record is modified by another human workflow or by a publishing process.

Such concurrent change is now automatically detected in the workflows. A warning is raised to the user working on the out-of-sync data, allowing him to ignore or merge these changes into his data transaction.

Concurrent changes are automatically detected and raised as needed when processing data entry workflows.

Design-Time Enhancements

Designers benefit from the productivity features of Convergence for MDM 2.2 to deliver faster iterations for their MDM initiatives.

Workflow Design Productivity

The workflow design has been enhanced with capabilities to support not only Interactive Data Augmentation and Validation, but also with the ability to add Customized Labels on transitions.

The design-time workflow editor now includes a Properties view. Using this view, developers can modify tasks and transitions without leaving the diagram, enhancing their productivity in workflow design.

Filters on Child Records

SemQL has been enhanced to support conditions based on child records.

For example, if a Customer has several Contacts, you can now easily design filters involving the customers' contacts:

The new ANY/ALL syntax is available from the Expression Editor. For more information, see the new "Semarchy Convergence for MDM SemQL Guide" available in the documentation library.

Export/Import Models Everywhere

Model edition export is now allowed from deployment repositories. With this option, administrators can transfer models as they were originally deployed between test/UAT and production environments.

Model edition import is now possible to development repositories. Import closed or open model editions either as new models, or on top of open model editions.
Using this feature, developers can transfer models across repositories at design-time with a just few clicks.

New Plug-in: Text Normalization and Transliteration

This new plug-in applies normalization, transliteration (including Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese and other eastern languages) and phonetic (metaphone, soundex, double metaphone, caverphone, refined soundex) transformations to text strings.

With this plug-in, the data certification process can transform international strings to a common standard, which makes fuzzy matching possible even for data published in different languages and character sets.

Other Changes

Design-Time

Administration

Deployment

New Features in Version 2.1

Overview

Semarchy Convergence for MDM 2.1 introduces new features to make the life of business users and data stewards easier and more productive: As they browse the data, then can perform quick records checkouts and immediately start authoring and managing data in newly organized editors. While working on this data, which now can includes errors and rejects, the are assisted with features such as automated ID generation and inline and bulk data validation. They can also take advantage of the improved data import/export in Excel and CSV and work with their favorite data editor.

With this release, developers and administrators are also invited to use the new design options for entity matching behavior and create retention policies and scheduled purges to enforce data governance and compliance policies.

Detailed Features

Entity Matching Behavior

This release introduces a new naming convention for entity types that replaces the Primary Key Type (SDPK, UDPK).
Entities are now identified by their Matching Behavior:

The matching behavior is defined when creating the entity and is modified using the Alter Entity action.

Automated ID Generation

Entities Primary Keys (IDs) can now be automatically generated in the data entry forms. The method for generating IDs is configured in the entity definition and may use sequence or a built-in UUID generator.

This feature facilitates data authoring through applications for business users and data stewards and they no longer need to enter ID values.

Error Processing Workflows

Contributions via data entry workflows now include fixing rejects, in addition to authoring or modifying data.
Model designers can define whether golden data, master data and/or rejects can be brought into the workflow that they create.

Using this feature, data stewards can now address data issues detected in the golden data certification process using regular data manipulation workflows, which are managed in the Convergence for MDM platform.

Improved Experience for Data Authoring and Stewardship

The data entry and duplicate management activities are now made easier to use through subtle improvements of the data entry and duplicate management editors.
This includes a complete reorganization and renaming for the actions. The are now grouped in a single Actions menu. Users can flag frequently used actions as Quick Actions to make them available in the editor toolbar.

Quick Records Check out

Users can now quickly select and check out records as they browse them. This operation adds these records to an existing activity or creates a new activity with these records. This activity automatically opens and the user can immediately start working on these records.

With this feature, users can naturally and quickly trigger activities as they see the data, dramatically boosting their productivity.

Workflow Data Validation

Data modified or entered in the context of a data entry activities is now be validated at two levels:

Using these two features, data authors can now pro-actively fix issues that may cause data rejection before saving each data record and before completing a task.

Improved Data Import/Export in Excel and CSV

The import/export feature available to extract data from the hub or bulk import data is now improved with the following capabilities:

These new capabilities help business users and data stewards manage customized exports and import for data viewing and bulk changes.

Retention Policies and Scheduled Purges

Preserving the lineage and history of the golden data is a frequent master data governance and regulatory compliance requirement. To make sure that the data lineage and history are preserved according to the governance and compliance requirements, model designers can now define Data Retention Policies for the model and for individual entities.

For example:

However, keeping this information may also create a large volume of data in the hub storage. To keep a reasonable volume of information, administrators can now schedule Purges for this data. These schedules are handled by a Purge Scheduler, accessible from the administration view. These purges respect the retention policies defined in the model design.

Retention policies and scheduled purges guarantee ease of administration, data volume control as well as compliance with data retention policies for regulatory compliance.

For more information about Retention Policies, see the "Defining Data Retention" chapter in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Developer’s Guide". For more information about purge scheduling, see the "Scheduling Data Purges" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Administration Guide".

New Features in Version 2.0

Major Features

Support for High-Availability Deployment

Convergence for MDM 2.0 supports the clustered deployment of the Convergence for MDM web application for high-availability and failover. A clustered deployment can be set up for example to support a large number of concurrent users performing data entry or duplicate management operation.

For more information, refer to the "High-Availability Configuration" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Installation Guide".

Display Components

The display of form and table view attributes can be configured by setting a Display Type and optionally the height and width of the display component. Display types allow including Embedded Content or URL, Images and Hyperlinks into the data access form and table views.

For more information, refer to the "Display Types" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Developer’s Guide".

Row-Level Security

Convergence for MDM 2.0 introduces a new level of details for securing data access.
It is possible to define SemQL Filters for the entities in a Model Privilege Grant. This filter will make accessible only the filtered records for the user having this role. Using filters, model designer can choose to restrict the access to specific entity records depending on the roles.

For more information, refer to the "Securing Data" chapter in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Developer’s Guide".

Model Variables

Model Variables can be defined in the model, these variables' values are refreshed from a query to an external provider. The Variable Value Providers, defined in the Administration Console perspective, can be either an LDAP-compatible directory or a database connected via a JDBC Datasource.
Variable values are refreshed when a user connects to access the hub data, and are local to this user’s session. The variable can be used for example in the filters defined for row-level security.

For more information, refer to the "Model Variables" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Developer’s Guide" and the "Configuring Variable Value Providers" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Administration Guide"

Model Documentation

Convergence 2.0 introduces a new feature to generate a model documentation set in HTML format.
This documentation set includes the Logical Model, Applications and Physical Model documentation.

For more information, refer to the "Generating the Model Documentation" section in the "Semarchy Convergence for MDM Developer’s Guide".

Client API

A new client API is available to design and develop customized user interfaces to:

This API is available in the semarchy-mdm-client-<version tag>.zip file with documentation and samples.

Other Changes

Administration

Deployment

Integration


Change Log

Version 2.0.1.

Version 2.0.2

Version 2.0.3

Version 2.0.4

Version 2.0.5

Version 2.0.6

Version 2.1.0

Version 2.1.1

Version 2.2.0

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 2.2.1

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 2.2.2

Known Issues

Bug Fixes

Version 2.2.3

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 2.2.4

Known Issues

Bug Fixes

Version 3.0.0

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 3.0.1

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 3.0.2

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 3.0.3

Known Issues

New Features

Bug Fixes

Version 3.0.4

Known Issues

Bug Fixes