Release summary

Release summary for IBM® Product Master Version 12.0.

Contents

Description

IBM Product Master provides a highly scalable, enterprise Product Information Management (PIM) solution. Product Master is the middleware that establishes a single, integrated, consistent view of products and services information of an enterprise.

IBM Product Master is the new name for InfoSphere® Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition. InfoSphere Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition is a product that is used to manage various entities such as products, suppliers, assets, locations, and even customers in some cases. Although you could manage various entities due to the flexible data model and adaptive user interface, InfoSphere Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition product is really built for Product Information Management (PIM) solution purpose. The product provides all the core capabilities that are a must for a robust PIM solution.

Although the product name reflected the product offering (collaborative authoring of master data through workflows), the name unfortunately did not do justice to the term PIM solution and was potentially confusing to the users (many of whom had no idea that IBM even had a PIM offering). Also, since the product name lacked Product keyword, the search engines could not be potentially used for digital marketing.

To address these concerns, the product name was changed to IBM Product Master. IBM Product Master retains the underlying InfoSphere Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition architecture and functions. With the IBM Product Master V12.0 release, the product introduces more capabilities that enable user personas to perform various tasks more efficiently. IBM Product Master continues to be part of IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management family with same operational support.

Type of Release Availability
General Availability of IBM Product Master, Version 12.0 15 May 2020

What's new

Simplified installer
Admin UI and Persona-based UI are now bundled into a single installer, which deploys both of them on a single WebSphere® Application Server.
Persona-based UI collaboration area enhancements
  • Quickly search the items under collaboration area by filtering out the empty steps and collaboration areas.
  • Ability to undo check-out feature for items under collaboration areas.
  • Directly open checked out items from Search, Explorer, or Free text Search pages and browse to an item under a specific step.
Persona-based UI interface enhancements
  • Ability to delete Saved Search or Saved Template from the Persona-based UI.
  • Display Lookup type attribute as a drop-down list by using Show as drop down. This controls the display of an individual Lookup attribute (drop down list or pop-up window).
  • Ability to decide the order of attributes on single-edit page by using New Line Before and New Line After. You can group or split the set of attributes for display as required, for example, Unit of measurement and an actual value are displayed together.
  • Ability to set the Collaboration Area or Explorer grid pagination size from the interface instead of a configuration parameter. You can set individual page size.
  • Ability to manage the Secondary specification from the Spec console.
Machine learning-based Standardization
Machine learning-based product standardization feature helps the data stewards in improving the data quality. To address data quality issues, use machine learning to standardize the product descriptions to fix any evident misspellings. The machine learning service learns contextual information of product descriptions, which is used to identify and replace the incorrect words in the descriptions.
Stock Keeping Units (SKU) Generation workflow sample
SKU generator sample for automatically creating an array of SKUs for a product. After the product and the SKU category is defined, run the SKU generator to automatically generate all the SKUs.

Defect fixes

Following is the list of APARs addressed with the IBM Product Master 12.0.
APAR Description
JR61351 In multi-occurrence grouping, node user can search only in the first occurrence of group node, and there is no way to search in other occurrences of the group node.
JR61353 Any custom UI on the entry preview pop-up window, when maximized, does not use the maximized screen.
JR61356 Unable to copy text from the Elasticsearch grid.
JR61488 Catalog view is not working for the Item pop-up window and Item location.
JR61550  None of the Action scripts works on a single-edit of search after clearing the cache.
JR61675 The timeout pop-up window does not display properly in the Mozilla Firefox browser.
JR61686 The column search does not find an item on the Search grid and works only on the loaded items.
JR61848 The secondary hierarchy of the catalog disappears in the interface.
JR61879 Reading database properties from the db.xml file and not the common.properties file for the IBM InfoSphere DataStage® integration.
JR61880 Importing data issue.
JR61913 Need multi-edit links access from the Entry Previews.
JR62026 Problem with String Enumeration rule list in the Persona-based UI.
JR62043 The Clear option in the Column filter is not working.
JR62170 Angular Preview scripts have a change in the preview-script.json file. The container id has changed to container name due to which the toolbar buttons are not getting displayed.
JR62186 Incorrect script operation description for STRING[] WORKFLOWSTEP ::GETWFLSTEPATTRIBUTEGROUPS()in workbench.
JR62219 Before saving multi-occurrence attributes, <Lookup_Table_Name> >> <PK> added irrespective of the display format set.
JR62220 In the Lookup table drop-down list after deleting the entry, Save is not enabled.
JR62221 In the Lookup table drop-down list, value selection is not working.

Enhancements

Following is the list of enhancements for the IBM Product Master 12.0.
  • IBM Product Master needs discard or undo check-out feature for the collaboration areas. For more information, see Enriching an entry.
  • Preview scripts in the Persona-based UI require a system-based container ID. For more information, see Developing Custom Tabs by using custom Angular scripts.
  • Persona-based UI does not display change details for the collaboration areas. For more information, see Enriching an entry and Enriching entries (Bulk updates).
  • Not possible to hide empty steps and empty collaboration areas. For more information, see Navigating the.
  • Multi-edit page fetches all item attributes despite specified in a view.
  • The sequence of the entries in the collaboration area step is the same as the sequence in which they were moved to the collaboration area step.
  • Cannot delete a Saved Search or Saved Template. For more information, see Using Search.
  • Persona-based UI needs a collaboration area search. For more information, see Navigating the.
  • Click Check out on the multi-edit page to open the item in the collaboration area. For more information, see Using Explorer.
  • Ability to decide the order of attributes on the single-edit page, for example, Unit of measurement and value to be grouped for display. For more information, see Editing or creating a spec.
  • Free text search takes much time to load results. Support for configuring display attributes on the Free text search result. For more information, see Enabling.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle for the IBM Product Master.
  • Consolidate the REST API logging from the mdm-rest.war file.

System requirements

The system requirements for the IBM Product Master installations.

For more information about system requirements for the IBM Product Master, see System requirements.

To see the detailed system requirements in the Software Product Compatibility Reports(SPCR), search IBM Product Master and press Enter.

Media

IBM Product Master consists of the following general media packages:

Media Part number​
IBM Product Master Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly CC6AWML
License Information CC6AXML
IBM Product Master Key Version 12.0 (Docker containers) CC6AYML

Installing

For step-by-step installation instructions, see Installing. For detailed migration instructions, see Migrating to Version.

Support

IBM Electronic Support offers a portfolio of online support tools and resources that provide comprehensive technical information to diagnose and resolve problems and maintain your IBM products. IBM developed many smart online tools and proactive features that can help you prevent problems from occurring in the first place, or quickly and easily troubleshoot problems when they occur.

IBM's improved personalization of support resources helps you focus on and be alerted to exactly the information and resources that are needed for efficient and effective problem prevention and resolution.