It’s once again time for our roadmap update! In this blog post, we will discuss our next milestones and upcoming releases. Our long-term vision remains strong, as discussed in the previous roadmap update. As usual, the short-term roadmap lives a bit according to the needs of our customers and partners, so here you’ll find the latest status update.

Long-term vision – the “Google Maps of Data”

As a quick recap of where we’re heading (see above): we aim to build a holistic Enterprise View of your data, centered around data models of different levels. Where everything is interlinked, everything is easily navigable, and everything is presented in a business-friendly and intuitive way – with increasingly more and more intelligence built into the tool.

What’s next for Ellie?

Short-term, we are continuing on the path previously laid out. Below you’ll find our plans for the immediate next releases. Note that these are always subject to change – the world moves fast sometimes! But they represent our best knowledge at this moment.

Customizable entity types coming in v4.3

In the very next version, Ellie v4.3, we are going to deliver something a lot of you have asked for! The entity types for conceptual entities in Ellie (Master, Transaction, Reference, etc.) are a good way to make your models more readable, and they can often be used to support e.g. Data Vault development. But sometimes you just need something else. Many of our clients have been asking about the possibility to customize these categories (and their colors), and we’re happy to announce that this will now become possible. In fact, this has been the single most requested feature for Ellie for a few months now!

The current entity types will remain as the default types, as they provide good value in many cases, but you can now choose to replace them with your own categorizations. Returning to the default types is of course always possible as well! This feature will be available for the Ellie admins in your organization – meaning that you can do it yourself, with no need for a support ticket to us.

Further integrations enabled with our Glossary API

As mentioned previously, we understand the importance of being able to integrate Ellie with other tools (like Data Catalogs for example) and making this as easy as possible for all our customers and partners. We are planning to launch our Glossary API in Ellie v4.4, giving you the ability to create, read, update, and delete entities in Ellie’s Glossary. Besides the conceptual entities themselves, you will also have access to all their metadata and assigned attributes via this interface.

Use cases enabled by this new API will include (but are not limited to):

• Syncing the Glossary between Ellie and other tools with terminology lists, such as Data Catalogs
• Feeding information back to Ellie from technical development tools, making it possible to e.g. list database tables or data product APIs containing data about an entity inside Ellie’s Glossary
• Presenting up-to-date definitions and other metadata from Ellie in other tools or public web pages for wider audiences

Work continues!

Going forward, we are continuing to plan for our Collibra integration, more APIs (including model imports), and optimizations and performance improvements with some technology upgrades coming to the conceptual modeling canvas. These are topics we will be telling more about later in the summer, though! Stay tuned – and as always, send all ideas and feedback our way!

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