What's new in version 11.6

Several new features and changes were introduced for IBM® InfoSphere® Master Data Management 11.6.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6 offers new capabilities and significant enhancements to support enterprise big data, industry solution integration, and information management initiatives.

Tip: Download InfoSphere MDM 11.6 feature packs and updates from IBM Support.

For information about InfoSphere MDM components that have been deprecated or removed, see Deprecated and removed components.

Note: The following sections are organized by date, with the most recent release at the top of the page and the oldest release at the bottom of the page.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.12 feature pack release (June 2022)

This release of InfoSphere MDM contains various bug fixes and security fixes, along with the following changes.
MDM Publisher refresh
This release of InfoSphere MDM includes updates to IBM MDM Publisher, including:
  • Security updates and enhancements
  • Removal from the user interface of target endpoints that are no longer available:
    • Master Data Connect on IBM Cloud Pak for Data
    • Master Data Connect on IBM Cloud

For more information about MDM Publisher, see Publishing master data using IBM MDM Publisher.

Software stack updates
This release adds support for the following software versions:
IBM Installation Manager 1.9.2.1

Installation Manager 1.8.9.6 and earlier have been superseded by 1.9.x releases. Users of all pre-1.9 releases should upgrade their systems to use version 1.9.2.1. For details, see the Installation Manager and Packaging Utility download documents support article.

IBM WebSphere® Application Server 9.0.5.11 and 8.5.5.21

For details, see the Recommended updates for WebSphere Application Server support article.

IBM Db2® 11.5.7
Oracle Database 19c

Oracle Database 19c is the current long term release, and it provides the highest level of release stability and longest time-frame for support and bug fixes. For details, see the relevant Oracle documentation.

Microsoft SQL Server 2019

For details, see the relevant Microsoft documentation.

JDBC driver 10.2

For details, see the relevant Microsoft documentation.

IBM MQ 9.2.4 or 9.2.0.5 CD and LTS (Continuous Delivery and Long Term Support)
For details, see the following documentation:
IBM Business Automation Workflow 21.0.3

For details, see IBM Business Automation Workflow 20.x and 21.x on IBM Documentation.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 DC

For details, see the relevant Microsoft documentation.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 8.5

For details, see the relevant Red Hat documentation.

Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04

For details, see the relevant Ubuntu documentation.

AIX® 7.2 TL5 or 7.3

For details, see the AIX support lifecycle information support article.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 feature pack release (March 2020)

Red Hat Container Certification

InfoSphere MDM containers are now Red Hat certified. Red Hat Container Certification signals that InfoSphere MDM containers meet certain Red Hat security and support requirements. For more information about Red Hat Container Certification, see the Red Hat web site.

MDM Operational Cache is now called IBM Master Data Connect

The feature formerly known as MDM Operational Cache has been renamed to IBM Master Data Connect. The documentation continues to refers to Master Data Connect as an operational cache capability, in general terms.

For more information about Master Data Connect, see Making master data available in an operational cache (IBM Master Data Connect).

IBM MDM Publisher can publish your trusted master data to IBM Cloud Pak for Data 3.0

When released, IBM Cloud Pak for Data 3.0 will introduce the new Master Data Connect add-in service. You can leverage this service along with MDM Publisher to publish your master data from InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 into the Master Data Connect on Cloud Pak for Data service.

IBM MDM Publisher support for virtual MDM data

With this release, IBM MDM Publisher now supports publishing for virtual MDM data. Both default and custom record types are supported. Only the entity composite view will be synchronized.

This enhancement means that you can now synchronize entities from your InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition installation to Master Data Connect.

Note: This release only supports publishing a single type of MDM data to each instance of Master Data Connect. For instance, if you publish physical MDM data from an InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition installation into a Master Data Connect instance, then you cannot also publish virtual MDM data into that same instance.

For more information about MDM Publisher, see Publishing master data using IBM MDM Publisher.

Enhancements to how IBM MDM Publisher publishes data

This release introduces significant improvements to the mechanism that MDM Publisher uses to transfer and update data into Master Data Connect. Both data security and load performance are now improved. The updated publishing mechanism uses Apache Spark executor processes and IBM Aspera®-based secure data transfers between MDM Publisher and Master Data Connect.

IBM Master Data Connect API standardization

The Master Data Connect APIs have been modified to conform to OpenAPI standards. This allows for easier inter-operation with other IBM and non-IBM technologies.

A number of API endpoints have redesigned signatures. New administrative endpoints enable administrators to load sample data and reset their Master Data Connect environment.

For more information about the Master Data Connect API, see the documentation in the Swagger API Explorer tool installed with the product.

IBM MDM Publisher and IBM Master Data Connect support for Red Hat OpenShift®

MDM Publisher and Master Data Connect can now be deployed on Red Hat OpenShift for easy integration into your OpenShift Container Platform environment. This is in addition to the existing support for deployment on Kubernetes.

Support for deploying InfoSphere MDM on Red Hat OpenShift using Helm

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 adds support for deploying InfoSphere MDM on a Red Hat OpenShift cluster by using Helm charts.

Note: Helm helps you to manage containerized applications. Helm charts help you to define, install, and upgrade these applications. For more information about Helm, see the Helm online documentation.

For more information about this enhancement, see Deploying InfoSphere MDM on OpenShift using Helm.

MDM Workbench support for virtual MDM default thresholds

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 introduces MDM Workbench support for enabling default thresholds in virtual MDM. This enhancement provides you with the ability to use MDM Workbench to configure default thresholds for new sources. You can now use the MDM Workbench to set the default autolink and clerical review thresholds, along with any applicable exceptions, on a single UI screen.

Note: Virtual MDM default thresholds were first introduced in version 11.6.0.7. With this capability, virtual MDM deployments can define the four default autolink and clerical review thresholds. These thresholds are used when comparing members, whether they are sourced from the same system or different systems.

For more information about working with thresholds in the MDM Workbench, see Thresholds. For information about enabling virtual MDM default thresholds, see Setting clerical review and autolink thresholds. For details about each of the default thresholds, see the mpi_enttype table reference topic.

Improved MDM Workbench capabilities

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 delivers improvements to the MDM Workbench that enable it to work with a much larger number of source systems in a given configuration, as compared to the previous feature pack release.

MPXDATA enhancements

In InfoSphere MDM, the MPXDATA utility uses raw data to build virtual MDM member unload files, generate comparison strings, assign bucket hashes, and create binary files. Beginning in version 11.6.0.11, MPXDATA can now ingest the historical changes of records, similar to MemPut’s partial mode, while still properly honoring the audit record numbers and point-in-time details of the changes.

Software stack updates
The InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.11 release adds support for the following software:
  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3
  • IBM Db2 11.5
  • IBM Business Automation Workflow 19.0.0.3

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 Pure Pattern deployments release (February 2020)

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 is now available for deployment on IBM PureApplication® Systems

For details about deploying InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 on IBM PureApplication Systems using Pure Patterns, see InfoSphere MDM deployment on IBM PureSystems® and Deploying the Standard and Advanced Edition pattern.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 for IBM Db2 on z/OS® is now supported for deployment on IBM PureApplication Systems

This release adds a new pattern to support deployment of InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 for IBM Db2 on z/OS. For details on deploying the InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 for Db2 on z/OS pattern, see Deploying the Standard and Advanced Edition for Db2 on z/OS pattern.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 feature pack release (August 2019)

IBM MDM Publisher

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 introduces a number of enhancements to the IBM MDM Publisher utility.

MDM Publisher now uses secure communication between pods and the MDM Publisher or Operational Cache Kubernetes cluster. To enhance the user experience, a new security wizard has been introduced as part of the installation scripts to simplify the process of adding trusted and secure endpoints to MDM Publisher.

This release also introduces limited support for deploying MDM Publisher on Minikube. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a Virtual Machine (VM), making it easy to deploy Kubernetes on a single machine. Minikube is intended for use in trial environments, and greatly simplifies the MDM Publisher deployment steps to encourage users to try MDM Publisher and explore its capabilities.

This release also includes several improvements within the MDM Publisher user interface.

In addition to these functional enhancements, the MDM Publisher stack architecture has been simplified and optimized, delivering the following substantial improvements:
  • Support for horizontal scaling of bulk loads through the use of Kubernetes Spark scheduler, Spark pods, and HDFS pods.
  • The ability for customers to deploy MDM Publisher in a Kubernetes cluster of its own, outside of an MDM Operational Cache Kubernetes cluster.
  • Quick startup and shutdown, with the average startup time reduced from 300 seconds to 30.
  • A reduced overall image size.
For more information about MDM Publisher, see the MDM Publisher documentation.
MDM Operational Cache

In InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10, the MDM Operational Cache stack and architecture has been simplified and optimized to use secure communication between services and between the Operational Cache and IBM MDM Publisher. This release also replaces the use of Solr and Zookeeper with Elasticsearch indexing.

The MDM Operational Cache now supports deployment on Minikube for trial use. Using Minikube simplifies the deployment of MDM Operational Cache, making it easier for users to explore its features.

This release includes several additions and improvements to the Operational Cache APIs, including:
  • New APIs:
    • GET by ID
    • GET neighbors by ID
  • Improvements to API documentation and an upgrade to OpenAPI Specification 3.0
  • Versioning support
For more information about MDM Operational Cache, see the MDM Operational Cache documentation.
Password vault support

This release of InfoSphere MDM introduces support for a password vault service, HashiCorp Vault, to help you to keep track of various system passwords. It can store passwords for user interfaces, standalone Java™ applications, and other applications that make up a typical InfoSphere MDM deployment.

For information about setting up a password vault for your InfoSphere MDM instance, see Configuring the password vault service.

Software stack updates
The InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.10 release adds support for the following software:
  • IBM Business Automation Workflow 19
  • Oracle Database 19c (19.3 and future fix packs)

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.9 feature pack release (April 2019)

Machine learning assisted data stewardship for InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition

The machine learning assisted data stewardship feature was provided in InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.8 as a technology preview. In the 11.6.0.9 release, this feature is now generally available.

The machine learning assisted data stewardship feature is currently only supported for virtual MDM data.

The InfoSphere MDM machine learning assisted data stewardship capability can help guide your organization's data stewardship decisions. Data stewardship is a critical part of any MDM system, and some suspect duplicate processing decisions can only be made by real people. By using machine learning, your organization can greatly improve the efficiency, accuracy, and automation of suspect duplicate processing decisions.

Machine learning assisted data stewardship improves over time by tracking and learning from the decisions made by your data stewards. You can periodically retrain the machine learning model, enabling it to making it smarter, better informed suggestions.

The machine learning assisted data stewardship user interface and the consent management user interface have been combined into a single UI called the MDM AE/SE user interface.

The machine learning assisted data stewardship feature is provided as a Docker container for all deployment options of InfoSphere MDM (including traditional installations, deployed Docker containers, or installable Docker containers). Persistence for the machine learning training data is provided by a standard Cassandra service that you must provide and manage yourself.

For more information about machine learning assisted data stewardship, see the machine learning assisted data stewardship documentation.

MDM operational cache and IBM MDM Publisher

The MDM operational cache feature was provided in InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.8 as a technology preview. In the 11.6.0.9 release, this feature is now generally available.

Today's organizations are realizing the benefits master data brings to their mobile and online applications. To do so effectively requires very fast access to master data in a highly scalable and concurrent access pattern supporting single or multiple data centers, either locally or globally as business processes require.

The InfoSphere MDM operational cache capability is designed to meet this requirement with state of the art, easy to consume REST APIs providing read access to master data. The REST APIs support text searches and queries against a graph database engine on Cassandra using the Gremlin graph query language.

Using the IBM MDM Publisher user interface or REST APIs, you can create subscriptions to bulk publish or live synchronize your master data into the operational cache. The live synchronization uses Kafka queues to send updates from InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition to the MDM operational cache.

With this configuration, the MDM operational cache can serve read requests, while write requests can continue to be routed to the central InfoSphere MDM operational server to maintain global de-duplication processes for managing entities and golden records.

For more information about operational cache, see the MDM operational cache documentation.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Physical MDM enhancements to account management

This release introduces new functionality in the Accounts area of Stewardship Physical MDM. Data stewards now have the capability to reassign account roles and account role locations that were not reassigned as part of an undo collapse process. They can efficiently reassign contract roles and account role locations associated with an inactivated person or organization record to the new linked records created by the undo collapse process. For more information about the account role management enhancements in IBM Stewardship Center, see Reassigning account roles after an undo collapse.

This release includes an enhancement on the Account screen in the Details tab to show role location addresses and contact methods. These are ordered based on the same priority that is used for search results.

This release also includes several label changes throughout the Stewardship Physical MDM screens to increase consistency, especially with regards to account management.

IBM Stewardship Center: Apache Kafka support

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.9 introduces support for Apache Kafka in the IBM Stewardship Center. This support relies on integration between InfoSphere MDM and IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) using the Kafka messaging framework. The MDM operational server sends notifications to Kafka topics whenever suspected duplicates get added or updated. Kafka consumers, running on BPM as administrative services, listen to the Kafka topics, parse the messages, and create suspected duplicate tasks on the process portal as needed.

InfoSphere MDM has also been enhanced to be able to send all kinds of notifications to Kafka topics.

MDM Inspector user interface: Enhanced support of Single Sign On (SSO)
This release of InfoSphere MDM introduces support for Single Sign On (SSO) in several areas:
Access token improvements

Access tokens have been implemented for inquiry transactions that involve direct child business objects. This improvement enables organizations to use field level security for these inquiries.

Full text search improvements

The full text search capability has been enhanced so that the search index gets synchronized after collapse, split, and delete transactions, and also after composite transactions. By improving the Kafka topics that monitor these transactions, the full text search capability can now ensure that when InfoSphere MDMparties are deleted from the MDM system, they will also be removed from the search index. This eliminates the issue of deleted parties appearing in full text search results.

Software stack updates
The InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.9 release adds support for the following software:
  • Oracle Database 18c Enterprise Edition (Release 18.0.0.0.0 - Production Version 18.3.0.0.0)
  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.11

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.8 feature pack release (December 2018)

Support for access tokens to secure full text search results

This release of InfoSphere MDM improves the full text search feature to enable field level security using access tokens. In InfoSphere MDM, access tokens control user access to protected resources. They enable organizations to control what fields are visible to each user. For more information about access tokens, see Controlling data visibility and access.

For information about enabling access token support for full text searches in IBM Stewardship Center, see Enabling access tokens for full text searches.

For information about full text searches, see Configuring full text searches and Searching for records.

Accelerated deployment support for Kubernetes

The documentation has been enhanced to provide detailed instructions about how to deploy InfoSphere MDM containers on the Kubernetes platform as part of an accelerated deployment scenario.

For information about deploying InfoSphere MDM containers on Kubernetes, see Installing InfoSphere MDM Standard and Advanced Editions (accelerated deloyment).

Technology preview: Machine learning assisted data stewardship
Important: This feature is provided in InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.8 as a technology preview only. The intention is for this capability to be included as a full InfoSphere MDM product feature in a future release. Use this preview to evaluate, test, and provide feedback to IBM about this feature.

The InfoSphere MDM machine learning assisted data stewardship capability can help guide your organization's data stewardship decisions. Data stewardship is a critical part of any MDM system, and some suspect duplicate processing decisions can only be made by real people. By using machine learning, your organization can greatly improve the efficiency, accuracy, and automation of suspect duplicate processing decisions.

Machine learning assisted data stewardship improves over time by tracking and learning from the decisions made by your data stewards. You can periodically retrain the machine learning model, enabling it to making it smarter, better informed suggestions.

The technology preview version of the machine learning assisted data stewardship feature is only available as part of the Consent Management user interface.

For more information about the machine learning assisted data stewardship technology preview, see the preview documentation on the IBM Support site.

Technology preview: Operational cache
Important: This feature is provided in InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.8 as a technology preview only. The intention is for this capability to be included as a full InfoSphere MDM product feature in a future release. Use this preview to evaluate, test, and provide feedback to IBM about this feature.

Today's organizations are realizing the benefits master data brings to their mobile and online applications. To do so effectively requires very fast access to master data in a highly scalable and concurrent access pattern supporting geographically distributed data centers.

The InfoSphere MDM operational cache capability is designed to meet this requirement with REST APIs providing read access to master data. The REST APIs support text searches and queries against a graph database engine on Cassandra using the Gremlin graph query language.

With this configuration, the operational cache can serve read requests, while write requests can continue to be routed to the central InfoSphere MDM operational server to maintain global de-duplication processes for managing entities and golden records.

The technology preview of the operational cache and IBM MDM Publisher includes a subset of the planned full set of capabilities. The technology preview includes:
  • A Docker image containing the MDM Bulk Publisher (without the ability to provide ongoing synchronization).
  • A Docker image containing the operational cache, including fully functional REST APIs and Gremlin Query APIs, Solr (for fast text searches), and Cassandra.

For more information about the operational cache technology preview, see the preview documentation on the IBM Support site.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.7 feature pack release (September 2018)

Full Text Searches in InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition

This feature pack introduces a new full text search capability that enables InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition users to perform physical MDM searches, regardless of the entity type, in a more dynamic way on any attributes. Full text searches empower users to use a simple string to search for information in any field, or to narrow their searches to a specific field. In this way, they are much more powerful than traditional InfoSphere MDM searches, which are more restrictive and only consider a predefined set of fields. To improve search performance, the full text search capability uses a search index that is synchronized with your physical MDM data.

The full text search capability leverages an indexing engine called Elasticsearch. When full text searching is enabled, the physical MDM entity information is synchronized with a search index. Once indexed, users can run searches on the index using REST search transactions that consider the entire content of the data. You can also enable full text searches for web applications such as the Consent Management user interface and IBM Stewardship Center.

For more information about the full text search capabilities, see Configuring full text searches.

Accelerated Deployment

Applying agile devOps methodologies is becoming a necessity to increase efficiency and time-to-value. One important cornerstone of a modern devOps process is having flexible and fast deployment options. One such deployment option is to leverage container technology such as Docker.

Starting in InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7, IBM provides the option to deploy using a Docker based container. InfoSphere MDM ships Docker images in two styles:
  • Installable Docker images - InfoSphere MDM is pre-extracted. End users can start the installable Docker containers using a Docker compose file and then deploy InfoSphere MDM using an interactive script.  
  • Deployable Docker images - InfoSphere MDM is pre-deployed. End users can start the deployable Docker containers with a Docker compose file and then begin using the already deployed InfoSphere MDM instance.

The Installable Docker images provide a shortcut to being ready to configure your InfoSphere MDM deployment. The Deployable Docker images provide you with an already deployed, configured, and ready-for-use InfoSphere MDM instance.

The InfoSphere MDM Docker images are built on an Ubuntu Linux v14.0.4 base Docker image that runs on all Docker supported hosts. This release includes the following set of images:
  • InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 Installable with IBM Db2 Enterprise Server Edition v11.1 and WebSphere Application Server Base Edition v9.0 images
  • InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 Deployable with Db2 Enterprise Server Edition v11.1 and WebSphere Application Server Base Edition v9.0 images
  • IBM Business Process Manager Server Edition v8.6 with IBM Stewardship Center installable images
  • IBM Business Process Manager Server Edition v8.6 with IBM Stewardship Center deployed images
  • InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 deployable client application image including Apache Kafka
  • InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 Workbench using IBM Rational® Application Developer v9.6 deployed on Ubuntu Linux
  • Docker compose files for deployable and installable InfoSphere MDM images to coordinate images
Note: The InfoSphere MDM Docker images are only available through the IBM Passport Advantage® distribution of InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7. They are not included in the version available from IBM Fix Central.

For more information about using the InfoSphere MDM Docker images for accelerated deployment, see Installing InfoSphere MDM Standard and Advanced Editions (accelerated deloyment).

Consent Management improvements
This release includes several enhancements in the Consent Management feature to improve the capture and management of consent in support of your organization's readiness for GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.
  • The Consent Management user interface now enables users to see the period of validity of consent management parameters such as processing purposes, provisions, and regulations.
  • The Consent Management user interface now provides the option to allow users to use full text searches to locate individuals in the Consent Management system. This feature leverages newly introduced full text search capabilities for InfoSphere MDM.
  • The handling of versioning for processing purposes has been enhanced. You can now define a successor for a processing purpose type. This allows you to create new versions of a purpose type while maintaining a link to the previous version.
  • This release includes enhancements to the way that Consent Management service calls are validated. This helps to reduce errors by ensuring that users provide the right kinds of information at the right times.

For more information about Consent Management, including these enhancements, see Managing consent.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Physical MDM (Advanced Edition)

InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 includes several new and enhanced capabilities in IBM Stewardship Center:

  • A significant improvement has been made to the way data stewards can search for and find records, regardless of the entity type. Leveraging the newly introduced full text search capabilities of InfoSphere MDM, the IBM Stewardship Center now includes a text search screen with a single input field that enables the Data Steward to search in a more dynamic way for records regardless of the entity type. Data stewards now have the flexibility to find, in a more dynamic way, records that match one or more words, or words that include wildcard symbols.
  • This release also includes improvements to the way that data stewards view entity relationships on the Overview screen. New pagination capabilities significantly improve how data stewards view relationships when a person or organization has many party-to-party or account relationships. Pagination has also been introduced on the Relationships and Accounts screens.
  • The Explore tab has been enhanced to significantly improve performance and visualization when an entity record has many relationships. This release introduces the ability to configure the maximum number of relationships that are displayed for a given entity. This enhancement noticeably improves performance, while also enhancing usability of the visualization by providing a clearer picture of the entities in view. This change also greatly reduces the need to scroll and zoom in and out to view related entities.

For more information about these IBM Stewardship Center enhancements, see Using IBM Stewardship Center.

Default Thresholds for Virtual MDM

Beginning in InfoSphere MDM version 11.6.0.7, virtual MDM deployments can now define four default thresholds (ssalscore, sscrscore, dsalscore, dscrscore) for each entity type. These four thresholds are used as default autolink and clerical review thresholds when comparing members, whether they are sourced from the same system or different systems.

Leveraging these default thresholds eliminates the need to insert all possible source system combinations in the mpi_srcxsrc table when the autolink and clerical review thresholds are not different than the defaults. This change also enhances the application performance and memory imprint, especially when there is a large number of sources already defined for a virtual MDM implementation.

For information about enabling the new virtual MDM default thresholds, see Setting clerical review and autolink thresholds. For details about each of the default thresholds, see the mpi_enttype table reference topic.

Software Stack Updates
  • This release adds support for IBM WebSphere Application Server v9.0. This is in addition to existing support for IBM WebSphere Application Server v8.5.5.
  • This release replaces support for IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software v9.5 with support for IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software v9.6.1. This is a mandatory upgrade for using the InfoSphere MDM v11.6.0.7 Workbench.
  • This release adds support for IBM Business Automation Workflow v18.0.0.1. This is in addition to existing support for IBM Business Process Manager v8.6.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.6 feature pack release (June 2018)

Consent Management improvements
This release includes several enhancements in the Consent Management feature to improve the capture and management of consent in support of your organization's readiness for GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.
  • The MDM Consent user interface now enables you to manage the consent settings of individuals whose profiles are stored in InfoSphere MDM as virtual MDM records. You can search for individuals either by doing an attribute search or based on a known entity ID or record ID.
  • The MDM Consent user interface's virtual MDM functionality is configurable. You can define which attributes and entity types are searchable.
  • The Welcome screen of the user interface is now configurable so that you can define the systems in which your users can search for individuals to manage their consent, depending on where the profile information is stored: virtual MDM, physical MDM, or an external system.
  • An About screen has been added to the MDM Consent user interface to display version information for the interface.
  • The MDM Consent user interface has been translated into several languages.
  • The validation of Consent Management service calls has been enhanced.
  • To enhance integration with IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, a new parameter has been added to enable the synchronization of processing purposes and processing activities into a particular language in the corresponding InfoSphere MDM code tables.
  • Documentation updates:
IBM Stewardship Center: MDM Functional Dashboard can now show decomposed statistics counts
Significant improvements were made to the MDM Functional Dashboard to sharpen the insights that data stewards can gather about the volume of activity that has occurred in the system. The System Activity graph has been enhanced to display decomposed transaction statistics counts. Decomposed statistics include a full breakdown of the secondary transactions that get run as part of composite transactions. By viewing the decomposed counts, data stewards can get a better understanding of how transactions run internally, and a clearer picture of the total transaction activity in the system. This is especially true for organizations that use many composite transactions.

The System Activity graph now provides users with the option to view the transaction count or decomposed count based on a chosen set range of time and increment or by date range, broken down by transaction type and source. The decomposed count view in the System Activity graph provides a statistical visualization of the internal transaction types: add, update, get, search, delete, merge, split (including undo collapse transactions) contained in the composite transactions.

For more information about the MDM Functional Dashboard and System Activity graph, see Viewing system statistics and activity.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.5 feature pack release (March 2018)

Consent Management improvements
This release includes several enhancements in the Consent Management feature to improve the capture and management of consent in support of your organization's readiness for GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.
IBM Stewardship Center: MDM Functional Dashboard enhancements
This release introduces two new views within the IBM Stewardship Center's MDM Functional Dashboard. The new views provide graphic visualizations and detailed information about:
  • Transaction processing times within a given time range
  • Batch load activities in the system

For more information, see Viewing system statistics and activity.

IBM Stewardship Center: Search by account

The Search dashboard in IBM Stewardship Center for MDM now enables data stewards to search for Person or Organization records using an account identifier.

For more information, see Searching for records.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.4 Pure Pattern deployments release (March 2018)

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.4 is now available for deployment on IBM PureApplication Systems

For details on deploying InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.4 on IBM PureApplication Systems using the Pure Patterns, see InfoSphere MDM deployment on IBM PureSystems.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.4 feature pack release (December 2017)

Use InfoSphere Big Match for Hadoop to publish InfoSphere MDM data to graph and analyze it to gain business insight
Note: InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.4 Standard and Advanced Editions include five nodes of IBM InfoSphere Big Match for Hadoop as a supporting program.

InfoSphere Big Match for Hadoop 11.5.0.5 includes a complete set of new capabilities centered around making InfoSphere MDM and Big Match data accessible to business users and providing them with the tools to analyze, match, and explore relationships in their data. The new IBM Entity Insight® features include powerful user interfaces to publish data and leverage a graph database to gain important business insights. The tools also empower business users with self service capabilities that give them easy access to data like never before.

For more information, see Publishing and analyzing data to gain trusted insight.

New Consent Management capability for physical MDM
InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition has been enhanced with the Consent Management feature to capture and manage consent as required by the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other privacy regulations:
  • New tables have been added to the data model and new services are provided to manage consent.
  • IBM Industry Models have been enhanced with privacy regulation-related content, including definitions for processing activities and processing purposes. By integrating the Consent Management feature with Information Governance Catalog, you can use the business definitions for consent in InfoSphere MDM.
  • By using the existing event and notification framework of InfoSphere MDM, you can configure consent events to notify other systems, such as marketing or analytical systems, about consent changes in real time.
  • With the new user interface for data stewards, you can review and update existing consent settings.

For more information, see Consent Management and Managing consent.

IBM Stewardship Center: Introducing the MDM Functional Dashboard

With this release, the IBM Stewardship Center for MDM introduces the MDM Functional Dashboard. The Functional Dashboard provides data stewards with insight into the system statistics, activities, trends, and changes that have occurred across a specified period of time, broken into customizable intervals. The Functional Dashboard is designed to enable users to quickly understand key MDM business parameters, performance, and patterns, and can be filtered either by source system or by domain (Party, Account, or Product).

The MDM Functional Dashboard provides graphical visualizations of:
  • The number of record changes, by source or by domain, across a period of time.
  • The number of suspected duplicate Person and Organization parties created, resolved, or deleted across a period of time.
  • The total number of records, organized by source or by domain, across a period of time.
  • The number of activities, by source, across a period of time.

The features of the MDM Functional Dashboard provide organizations with greater insight into what is happening in their InfoSphere MDM system.

For more information, see Viewing system statistics and activity.

New system statistics collection capabilities for physical MDM

To support the new MDM Functional Dashboard, this release of InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition introduces new capabilities that enable the collection of statistics about transactions and entities in the system.

The new system statistics feature collects entity statistics data and transaction statistics data in real time, and then computes and processes the statistics data using Apache Kafka. This feature includes a mix of new InfoSphere MDM components, services, tables, and business objects, and it leverages Kafka Stream and Kafka Connect applications.

The statistics data collection facilities provides a way to collect entity statistics and transaction statistics data at real time. The feature collects and computes how many entities are added, updated, deleted, or inactivated, and also tracks how many suspected duplicates are created or resolved, all in real time. It also tracks and counts each transaction run on the system. The collected data is then published to Kafka brokers and aggregated hourly. Entity statistics are computed based on the top level entity types and then grouped by entity type, source, and event time.

This statistical data can also be accessed through a set of new services, enabling you to leverage these new capabilities within your operational and management infrastructure, in addition to getting insights from the MDM Functional Dashboard.

For more information, see Collecting system statistics.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.3 feature pack release (September 2017)

Apache Kafka enablement

To set the stage for better integration with other products and solutions, the InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.3 release enables InfoSphere MDM to use Apache Kafka for notifications. InfoSphere MDM now includes a Kafka enabled notification channel in parallel to the existing JMSChannel. You can leverage the Kafka channel for System Activity Monitoring (SAM).

In addition, InfoSphere MDM now includes Kafka based stream flows that can publish data in and out of InfoSphere MDM, leveraging the existing Adaptive Services Interface (ASI) for transformation of data. These stream flows are assembled using Kafka Database Connector, Kafka Entity Change listener, and a set of Kafka stream processors.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard improvements
With this release, the IBM Stewardship Center provides significant improvements to the way you view Person and Organization records. The comprehensive new Overview screens enable operational MDM data stewards to more quickly understand the most relevant aspects of a party record in a visually appealing summary. From the Overview screens, you can easily navigate to the detailed entity information that you need the most. The summary view contains:
  • Key demographic information, with direct links to edit screens
  • Alerts associated with the party record
  • An enhanced relationship exploration map to enable seamless understanding of the party's importance and relationships across multiple domains
  • An interaction history tracker to provide insight into a party's customer status and sentiment
  • Social media integration with Twitter to deliver an immediate understanding of the party's current interests
  • Party contact preferences
  • A list of pending stewardship tasks related to the record
  • An interactive map showing the party's primary address location

In addition to the new Overview screens, this release also includes performance improvements when navigating between search and edit pages within the Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard.

Installation enhancements

In InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.3, the product installation has been enhanced to support Apache Kafka feature deployment.

The InfoSphere MDM deployment and runtime have now fully removed the need for DataDirect JDBC Driver. As a result of this change, the InfoSphere MDM Web Reports user interface now uses the native JDBC Driver.

Updates to system requirements
This release of InfoSphere MDM includes a number of changes to the system requirements:
  • Microsoft Windows 7 is now supported for use as a development environment. This includes support for running both the MDM Workbench and the InfoSphere MDM operational server in Windows 7 (for development purposes only).
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2016 is now supported for InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition.
  • Google Chrome browser is now supported for use with the InfoSphere MDM user interfaces built on IBM Business Process Manager (BPM), such as IBM Stewardship Center. This support does not extend to any non-BPM based user interface.
Added support for IBM Db2 for z/OS v12r (December 2017 update)

This release adds support for IBM Db2 for z/OS v12. This change to the system requirements enables InfoSphere MDM solutions to leverage the key new enhancements offered by this level of Db2, including scalability, reliability, efficiency, security, and availability. It also broadens the range of back-end storage solutions that can now be supported by InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.3.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.2 feature pack release (May 2017)

Installation and upgrade enhancements

In InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.2, the installation application has been enhanced to perform pre-configuration validation checks to ensure that all required components are in place for a smooth installation. These validation checks increase the probability of a successful installation, thereby reducing the time and effort required for analysis if certain conditions are not met.

The InfoSphere MDM configuration and runtime has been modified to use drivers from the corresponding database vendors. This eliminates the issues encountered due to using the JDBC Driver from Data Direct.

The upgrade processes for InfoSphere MDM have also been enhanced to use JDBC for the database portion of the upgrade.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard improvements

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.2 enhances several physical MDM data stewardship capabilities in IBM Stewardship Center. Key among these changes are a number of suspect processing task management enhancements. The new enhancements allow data stewards to better refine their searches for tasks, and also to create tasks based on the results of the new comprehensive suspect search functionality. These new capabilities allow data stewards to manage suspect resolution tasks more efficiently by providing the ability to directly control the specific tasks, along with the number of these tasks, that appear in their work queue.

The search capabilities of the Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard have been further enhanced introducing searches by administration system key and the ability to search and view inactive person or organization records.

To enhance the user experience, the Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard now includes a list of recently viewed screens to enable data stewards to quickly navigate to previously viewed records and to control which recently viewed items they want to retain in future sessions.

This release also includes a number of new controls and enhancements to allow data stewards to manage households more efficiently and effectively. The new features give data stewards the ability to more seamlessly:
  • define the criteria used to form a household.
  • add or remove members from a household.
  • move members from one household to another.
This release also introduces controls that keep the integrity of a household, while still allowing data stewards to maintain the households manually or automatically by the system.

This release also improves the serviceability and customizability of the physical MDM capabilities of IBM Stewardship Center. The party maintenance functionality has been re-architected to use a IBM Business Process Manager 8.5.7 feature called nested services. This change makes it easier to manage customizations while applying feature packs and upgrading to new versions of the IBM Stewardship Center.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Virtual MDM dashboard improvements

The version 11.6.0.2 release of the Virtual Stewardship Center gives data stewards more control over virtual MDM data. The new features allow data stewards to visualize and manipulate the relationships between entities as part of their work flow and provide the ability to directly control how member records are associated with them. These new capabilities help to close the gap with the legacy virtual MDM stewardship offering, known as Inspector, and help to bring the Stewardship Virtual MDM dashboard in line with the Stewardship Physical MDM dashboard from a functional perspective.

Reference data management

InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub 11.6.0.2 includes usability enhancements to make it easier for data stewards to work with reference data sets.

The Hierarchy editing screens have been enhanced to enable you to edit properties and translations for values while working with the hierarchies. This eliminates the need to switch back to the grid view to edit the properties. The navigation has been enhanced to allow you to switch between the Set Properties, Values, and Hierarchy views with a single click, instead of having to access a menu to switch views. This change makes these views easier to access so that you take advantage of their more advanced capabilities.

You can now sort based on any column in a table, making it easier for you to find the data you need to work with and to bring feature parity to the sorting functions previously added to the Map screen. The grid view has also been enhanced to display more columns of data by default instead of requiring you to manually configure it.

In addition to the usability changes, we have begun an effort to improve the structure and content of the RDM transaction documentation. One key change is that the documentation now groups the transactions based on their functional areas. In addition, we have removed transactions that are not used or deprecated, and have started updating the details about how to use each transaction. We have begun this effort by focusing on the transactions that customers have expressed concerns about, and have started working our way through the remaining transaction topics. This will be an iterative process that will take some time to complete.

Grouping and Householding improvements

The Householding feature introduced in 11.6 has been enhanced to treat a household independently of the group it is assigned to. This capability improves the survivorship logic associated with households to be based on the current grouping name of the records in the grouping table.

With this release, InfoSphere MDM also supports multi-algorithm support using the Probabilistic Matching Engine's deduplication and supplementary algorithms. For example, your organization may have party records belonging to different lines of business with different roles. You can now further classify these and apply different matching and searching algorithms on each subclass.

InfoSphere MDM Pure Pattern deployments release (April 2017)

InfoSphere MDM 11.6 is now available for deployment on IBM PureApplication Systems

For details on deploying InfoSphere MDM 11.6 on IBM PureApplication Systems using the Pure Patterns, see InfoSphere MDM deployment on IBM PureSystems.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.1 feature pack release (February 2017)

Installation and upgrade enhancements

The installation and upgrade processes have been enhanced to support the continuous delivery model. You can now seamlessly upgrade your deployment from version 11.6.0.0 to the version 11.6.0.1 feature pack. There have also been improvements to the upgrade process when you are upgrading your deployment from a previous major release (versions 11.0 through 11.5).

MDM messaging adapter enhanced to cater to the MQRFH2 header

This item was a customer enhancement request from the InfoSphere MDM RFE Portal on IBM developerWorks®.

IBM Stewardship Center: Stewardship Virtual MDM dashboard improvements

In addition to fixing a large number of Virtual Stewardship Center defects, this release includes user interface changes to enhance usability and increase compatibility with legacy user interfaces such as Inspector.

IBM Stewardship Center: Grouping and Householding improvements
Building on the enhancements released in InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.0, this release adds several improvements to the way the IBM Stewardship Center manages groups and households:
  • When editing a group, you can now make the group name editable.
  • While adding a household group, you can now provide a group name, a group type, and comments. Other attributes, such as the start and end dates and source system, are now hidden when you are adding a Household group type
  • You can now add or delete roles from members of a household.
  • You can now expire household groups.
  • While adding a member to a household group, the IBM Stewardship Center checks to determine if that party is already a member of another household group. If so, a message will display to ask if you still want to add this member to this household group. If yes, then the member is added to the new group and the old group association is inactivated. If not, then the old group association remains as it is.
IBM Bluemix® Data Connect Publisher

This release introduces a new tool that you can use to export your InfoSphere MDM data for use in IBM Bluemix Data Connect operations.

Reference data management

InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub 11.6.0.1 includes key defect fixes and enhancements to support the batch migration of InfoSphere MDM RDM data.

Batch migration scripts are available as samples that you can extract from the installation package file IBMInfoSphereMasterDataManagement_Samples_<version>.zip.

Sample: Loading MDM data using IBM InfoSphere Information Server

A new tool is available as a sample that enables you to load Person party information into InfoSphere MDM using InfoSphere Information Server. Extract the sample from IBMInfoSphereMasterDataManagement_Samples_<version>.zip.

InfoSphere MDM 11.6.0.0 release (December 2016)

General enhancements
Continuous delivery using feature packs

InfoSphere MDM 11.6 represents an important shift in the way that IBM delivers updates to this product. Product updates will now be delivered using a continuous delivery strategy, meaning that new features and enhancements can be provided in smaller feature packs rather than having to wait to be included in a larger release. As a result, you can more quickly obtain new product features and more easily update your deployment to take advantage of them.

Upgrade enhancements

This release introduces greater automation to product upgrades by providing new and improved upgrade scripts.

Added Ubuntu support

Ubuntu is now a supported operating system environment.

Standard and Advanced Editions
The following features were added or enhanced for InfoSphere MDM Standard Edition and Advanced Edition:
IBM Stewardship Center: Collaborative stewardship for virtual MDM deployments

IBM Stewardship Center has expanded its capabilities for virtual MDM implementations to include probabilistic search, potential duplicate task management, and advanced relationship and hierarchy visualization.

IBM Stewardship Center: Enhancements for physical MDM deployments

IBM Stewardship Center now has enhanced coverage for the Account (Contract) domain and support for groupings (view, create, maintain, and search for members), including households and enhanced hierarchy functionality (history time slider, multiple hierarchies management, and support of orphan nodes).

Enhanced household grouping

This release introduces the ability for physical MDM implementations to create households or other groupings in an automated fashion, leveraging the powerful InfoSphere MDM probabilistic matching algorithms.

Collaborative Edition

The following features were added or enhanced for InfoSphere MDM Collaborative Edition:

Supplier focused persona support

Improved productivity through usability enhancements targeted at the individual or individuals in an organization that focuses on supplier-related activities.

API enhancements

REST API definitions have been added for the Supplier Persona UI.

Installation enhancements

You can install the REST application for Collaborative Edition and the Supplier Persona UI by automated installation using installation scripts or through manual installation.

Note: For more information about what's new in InfoSphere MDM Collaborative Edition, see What's new in Collaborative Edition.
Reference data management

The following features were added or enhanced for InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub:

Enhanced Batch Import
The Batch Import feature now supports importing reference data sets with compound keys and reference data set value translations. This enables performance enhancements for hierarchies and map lists as well as better control over sort options.
Documentation enhancements

In addition to added documentation for the new and changed features described in this topic, this release includes the following documentation changes:

Improvements to InfoSphere MDM RDM installation and upgrade documentation

The InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub installation and upgrade documentation in previous releases was unnecessarily complex, causing confusion and errors. For version 11.6, an effort was made to simplify and improve this documentation. In response to user and expert testing, some topics were removed, some were added, and others were rewritten. Additionally, some of these improvements were back-ported to the InfoSphere MDM 11.5 documentation.

For full InfoSphere MDM RDM documentation, including the installation and upgrade topics, see the InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management Hub and Custom Domain Hub 11.6 documentation.