Collaboration and Administration Support

Collaboration and Group Support

These features are typical of any enterprise level IT platform. We will not provide too many details as any IT savvy person should be able to relate to them

• Multi-user design environment supports collaboration on large, enterprise-wide projects: One should have a collaboration capability, with some inherent work-flow type environment, whereby the DI design can be done by multiple users simultaneously. This will be supported by tracking of changes, resolution of conflicts and manual acceptance of changes.

• Ability to distribute data integration tasks: This is like work-distribution capability typically found in the work-flow based systems. One should be able to assign chunk of tasks to different people, manage resource loads and track the time taken to complete a task.

• Version management with concurrent developers and release managers: Self-explanatory

• Central Library of data integration routines to enable the re-usability: The data integration system should allow creating a repository of re-usable routines, which can be used by multiple users. There should be a version management environment around this repository.

Administration

Most of the features mentioned here are typical of any enterprise level IT tool.

• A common console to track the data integration activities: You should have one administration control panel, which will allow you to manage all what you need to do for your DI tool. This will actually not be a single screen (as all the DI management related tasks cannot be shown in a single view). This panel will be an integrated display of all options and tasks, like wizards, scheduling management, DI operations tracking, version management, user access management, metadata management and so on...

• Ability to schedule the sequence: A DI tool will have scheduling capabilities, which includes:

• Creating the entire operations flow for sequential and parallel activities
• Define the number of simultaneous threads
• Define the time caps for the batches to run
• Define the mandatory and optional batches
• Define on the activity logging linked to various batches...

• Automatic or manual management of the sequence of activities: You can set-up the entire operation in an auto-mode and to be stopped only if it hits certain conditions. Alternatively you can have it all manual or a combination of auto and manual.

• Manual or automatic validation checks, pre and post batches: This is the extension of the previous point. The system should be able to do checks on the auto as well as manual modes. It should be able to create alerts, messages and logs on the results of those checks.

• Work-flow based capability to do scheduling: The whole scheduling can be defined using work-flow functionality where you can create components of schedule, and someone else can tie them all to-gather or approve the same.