5.0 Products & Assets

5.0 is a major release that changes how Products and data are managed and touches most of the areas in the platform. Key benefits are:

• Products and their underlying data, i.e. Assets, can be managed independently, allowing different teams to work autonomously to launch and evolve a Product faster and more easily.

• Assets can now be shared across multiple Products, and Products can exist without any Assets, streamlining the management of data and unlocking the capability to test demand of new Product lines.

• Changes to both Products and Assets can now be staged and released when ready. This helps control the evolution of a Product, while maintaining the existing consumer experience.

Overview of changes

PRODUCTS

• Manage products. The Manage Products view lists all Products accessible to a user. This may be for Product creation, editing, subscription management or release depending on the user, their roles or their relationship to the Products listed. The whole area has been reworked for better user experience and to separate data management into assets.

  • Overview page. The Product overview page is shown once a Product has been created. This page enables management, sharing, editing and releasing of the Product.

  • Assets. Products may contain data in the form of Assets, these are added in the Assets section. Users can gain access to these Assets via a subscription to a product. 

  • Packaging. To make a product more easily discoverable and informative on the exchange, users can describe their Product, add visuals and select categories and tags. These will be visible on the product page.

  • Subscription plans give users the ability to consume Products and the Assets they may contain. 

  • Visibility. The visibility setting allows Product managers to expose the Product to target users/organizations. 

  • Last refresh date. The last refresh date of a product can be updated manually or set to update in sync with an identified asset that the product contains.

  • Sharing product for management. Users must have manage permissions for a Product to share it with other users or organizations. Product sharing grants management permissions only.

  • Releasing a product. Users must have a Product administrator role to release a Product. Releasing a Product is possible from the Product overview page using the release panel. Drafted changes can be identified using the yellow change markers. Releasing a Product transitions its state from draft or draft with changes to live. 

  • Deleting a product. Users with a Product administrator role are able to delete products published by users in their organization. Ecosystem administrators are able to delete any product from any organization.

• Subscription management. All subscription management permissions will be shifted away from an organization admin and grouped under a new role, Subscription administrator. 

  Subscription administrators are able to view all products released by users in their organization and allocate, replace and expire subscriptions for users and organizations. Subscription management is available via the manage products view for users with this role.

ASSETS

• Manage assets. The Manage Assets view lists all Assets accessible to a user. This may be for Asset creation, editing, sharing or release depending on the user, their roles or their relationship to the Assets listed.

  • Asset overview. The Asset overview page is available once the Asset setup is complete. 

    From this view, users with manage permissions are able to share and release the asset.

    The tabs available let an asset manager review details of the source, review data dictionary, data sample, metadata and updates.

  • Asset sources. Users can create Assets from a number of supported connector types. Where available, users are able to choose for their Asset to remain at source or to have it stored on platform.

  • Data dictionary. For table Assets, a data dictionary is generated. The information contained in this view includes all columns, their data types and a description that can be set.
    Data sample. For table Assets, a 10 row data sample is generated. A toggle is included on this tab for users to decide whether to have the data sample displayed on the Product page or not. 

  • Asset updates. Asset updates allow users to setup periodic updates that refresh asset data. They can be toggled on from the updates tab.

    Once enabled, the user will be provided with:

    • Data location - users load the new data into a staging location on their connector storage

    • Trigger file location - once the new data has completed loading, users upload a trigger file that specifies where the new data is. The system will then ingest data from the specified location.

    • Status file location - the system will supply an end-of-job status file containing the outcome of the load.

  • Asset sharing. Users must have manage permissions for an Asset to share it with other users or organizations. Asset sharing grants Use and/or Management permissions.

    • Use

      • Use in Space

      • Create Export

    • Manage

      • View and edit

      • Share

      • Release

  • Release asset. Users can complete the first release of an Asset using the release panel on the right of the overview page. Assets can only be released once all data copy or preparation processes are complete. 

  • Deleting asset. Assets can be deleted from the manage assets view or the asset overview page. During deletion, the user will be informed of existing asset relationships before they confirm deletion. Some relationships block the user’s ability to delete the asset and need to be managed first. If asset is in setup state, there will be no dependencies and it can be deleted straight away. 

  • Asset usage. To understand how your asset is being used by consumers, an asset usage view is available on the asset overview page.

EXCHANGE AND NAVIGATION

• Navigation. The layout of platform features has been updated to clearly separate the activities performed by producers and consumers. Users performing activities in either of these categories see only what is applicable to them, depending on their roles.   

Updated product page

Producers can provide information about their product to enable consumers to make informed decisions on whether to subscribe or contact the producer to negotiate a subscription.

Product page shows:

• Summary

• Assets

• Subscription plans

• Usage permissions

MY COLLECTION

My collection is a single place where users can view the products for which they have active subscriptions and the assets for which they have use permissions. 

For each product and asset, users can see the type, owning-organization, the method through which they obtained access and the usage permissions they have. Sort, filter and pagination controls enable easy navigation of the table items.

USE PRODUCTS AND ASSETS

• Use assets in spaces. Users with space permissions are able to select products and/or assets when creating a space. 

  • Where assets are contained in a product, the subscribed user is only able to select the product unit for addition to the space. This brings all assets contained in the product, into the space. 

  • Where users have received asset usage permissions directly via a share, assets will be listed separately and can be added to a space as single units.

• Export assets and products. Users with export permissions are able to select products or assets for export. Only one product or asset can be exported at a time. 

  • Products and assets for export are selectable from a table with a number of filter and search components to help find the asset for export more easily.

  • Where products contain a mix of file and table assets, users must choose one asset type to export and create another export for the other.

  • At source asset exports are not yet supported. 

• Automation. Automation allows users to create code assets as a result of some space activity. These code assets contain some instruction in reference to various products and/or assets contained in a space, this is used to create some output data. 

  • Using tasks, code assets can be set to run on a repeating basis thus enabling repeating derived outputs from a space. 

  • The task and the code asset set up is frozen once linked with a product to ensure consistent data outputs that also uphold any enforced subscription lineage that may apply to the implicated products and/or assets.

SUBSCRIPTION LINEAGE

When users create new assets from some activity in a space (i.e from a space or task) the relationships between contributing products/assets and the newly created asset is tracked. This is known as lineage. 

In cases where producers would like to maintain control and transparency of who is consuming their data assets, they can make use of the lineage enforcement setting. It is set to either enforced or not enforced on a subscription plan. A subscription plan is then applied to a product. Subscription plans govern how users consume the data once they’re subscribed.

Setting subscription lineage to enforced means that wherever a product is used to create new assets/products, the consumers of those new assets/products will be required to gain subscription access to the contributing products too before they can use the new assets/products. 

Where subscription lineage is not enforced, any contributing products are simply part of the record of lineage but consumers of new assets/product don’t require subscriptions to them too.

UPDATES TO ROLES