June 2020 Zeenea Product Spotlight

Release

New items & connectors and even more automation

Zeenea is focused on providing a new and user-centric experience allowing users to easily discover and understand their data asset landscape with our automated capabilities. In other words, becoming data fluent at the enterprise-level!

Our Product Spotlight gives you the scoop on the latest Zeenea Workspace updates.

Learn how to use Zeenea Data Catalog and meet your data projects’ deadlines by easily accessing reliable information.
We’ve launched some new features and capabilities that we think you’ll love. They will enhance your enterprise assets in a unique source of truth. Here is a recap of the latest product release.

Curate new data assets
- Data visualisation items
- Custom items
Catalog your data with our new Atlas Connector
Automated imports of data process items
Data Catalog authentication enhanced
New premium ERP & CRM connectors available

Curate new data assets

Zeenea automates the curation of your data assets, their schemas, business terms and data processes with its wide-range and powerful connectivity.
Despite this, we were aware that it was not enough for your data teams. To help them discover and leverage all your enterprise assets within our easy-to-use solution, we have extended our asset curation capabilities with 2 new items!

FIND YOUR CONNECTORS

Manage your Data visualization items

Most organizations have adopted data visualization solutions to visually represent data in a way that maximizes its business value. However, those reports and analysis are still struggling to be shared and understood at the enterprise level. This is where Zeenea comes in!

By connecting your data visualization solutions, such as PowerBI or Tableau, Zeenea is able to curate your reports into our Data Catalog and once again, simplify your data discovery journey.

As for the other assets curated into Zeenea Studio, your Data Steward(s) can:

scan all of the data visualization reports stored in your solutions and automatically import them with their already existing documentation,
create effective metamodel templates to continue manually documenting your data visualization reports,
define the priority information to be filled in,
assign contact owners and other roles,
comment and search for the above assets.

Create Custom items

Enterprises deal with several kinds of assets. How can you keep control over an ever-growing number of assets? How do you keep them understandable and allow data teams to quickly find the most relevant information for their projects?

To meet these challenges, Zeenea developed a new feature: Custom Items.

You can now create, search for and document custom items within our data catalog. For example, these custom items could represent the applications your business uses, or what APIs are available within your organization.

It provides structure to your asset landscape by recreating multilateral links throughout data assets.

Designed to be used on a larger scale, Custom Items improve your organization’s knowledge graph: the more links you create, the more context you bring to your assets.

More specifically, with this first version of the Custom Items, your Data Stewards can:

Create new types of items in the catalog which will then be added to the list of native types already managed by Zeenea (Datasets, Business Terms, etc.);
Import your repositories’ content in order to populate your Custom Items with rich objects such as its name, description, contacts, etc.;
Customize information asset templates by using these new properties;
Create links between your assets and your Custom Items to categorize them;
And finally, use them as filters to explore the catalog and find relevant assets quicker.

Catalog your data with our new Atlas ConnectorIn order to deliver an enterprise and reliable data catalog, we provide many connectors that automate and curate metadata including Cloud & Big Data storages, Relational databases, Non relational databases, and more are constantly being developed.By using our connectors, Zeenea provides a reality driven data catalog for data-driven companies to ensure your data consumers access up-to-date information stored within our powerful platform. Today, we are keen to announce the release of the Atlas connector.Our connector will help you better manage data from an Atlas source. It can automatically connect to your database, and retrieve a broad range of metadata. Our Atlas connector is able to periodically collect information and detect modifications related to your schema. The connector can collect technical metadata, such as technical names, data types, constraints related to your tables and their columns, but also documentation you may have provided at the table of field level.

Automated imports of Data Process itemsWith the launch of our newest Atlas connector, we’re also releasing the possibility to import data processes from your dataset sources.When your data steward imports items from a source where there are known data processes, those processes and direct ancestor and child datasets are automatically imported into Zeenea Data Catalog. An item’s lineage is then immediately available and allows you to navigate and have a visual understanding of your data’s life cycle. A Process can not be inventoried or import by itself, it’s always linked to other items.There is still the possibility to manually create data processes if you want to enrich them with non-referenced processes. Data Processes are also imported with their existing documentation.As for the other assets curated into Zeenea Studio, your Data Steward(s) can:

create effective metamodel templates to continue manually documenting your data processes,
define the priority information to be filled in,
assign contact owners and other roles,
comment and search for the above assets.

New premium ERP connectors available

For the last 3 decades, companies have been relying on ERP and CRM systems to run their operations. In response to the need to comply with regulations, reduce risk, improve profitability, competitiveness and customer engagement, they have to become Data Driven.

In addition to the need to leverage a wide variety of new data assets, strategic and historical data from those systems have to be involved in any Data Initiative.

Understanding metadata coming from those ERP and CRM systems come with the following challenges:

They have large, complex, hard to understand and customized database models;
Understanding the logical descriptions, the relationship definitions and more means to serve Data Citizens is almost impossible without the appropriate help.

Zeenea announces the immediate availability of its Premium ERP connectors (priced separately) in its Enterprise Edition to automate metadata management of the following systems.

sap connector

SAP and SAP/4HANA
SAP BW

oracle connector

Oracle E Business Suite
JD Edwards

salesforce connector

people-soft connector

microsoft-dynamic-connector

MS Dynamics AX
MS Dynamics CRM

siebel connector

Data Catalog authentication enhancedUser authentication is always the first step in any journey. For your employee, it can also cause frustration: the login and password changes for each service and it’s difficult to remember all of them.In order to make it easier for everyone, we now provide a brand new authentication system and a way to integrate your enterprise’s login.We support the most common identity providers and protocol types (Active Directory/LDAP, ADFS, Azure Active Directory Native, Azure Active Directory, OpenID Connect, PingFederate, SAML, GSuite)There is also the possibility to log in with specific Zeenea credentials if you need to keep Zeenea separate from your other activities and applications.Password management for this type of authentication has now been improved and responds better to security calls: