Excel is easy to use, but not user friendly
Excel is on nearly every desktop in any Windows based organisation and with the Master Data Services Add-in, it puts the data well within the reach of the users. Whilst it is simple it is in no way user friendly when compared to other applications that your users may be using. Not to mention that for most this will be the only part of the solution they see! Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to supply the same data but with an intuitive, mobile ready front end that people enjoy using?
Developers are tightly constrained
Developers like to develop, not choose options from drop down menus in a web based portal. With MDS, not only can Devs not make use of Visual Studio and a like but they are very tightly constrained by the business rules engine. At this point we should be able to make use of our preferred IDE so that we can benefit from source control, frameworks and customised business logic.
Not scalable according to modern expectations
Finally, MDS cannot scale to handle any kind of “big data”. It’s a bit of buzz word but as businesses collect more and more data, we need a data management option that can grow with that data. Due to the fact that MDS must be deployed from a server, there is no easy way to meet those big data requirements.
There are a few pieces to Matt’s solution, making for an interesting read.