Azure Data Catalog - Toolbar

Microsoft in the News - Microsoft is helping with your customer churn rate.

As any business manager worth their weight in spam knows, keeping a customer is a lot less expensive than finding a new customer.  In fact, it has been estimated that in the retail business, it is five times less expensive.  That is why business owners can become obsessed with their customer churn rate.

Churn Rate:  The annual percentage rate at which customers stop being a customer.

Predicting which customers are going to churn has been a highly sought after goal for a long time.  Businesses have been collecting customer data for years, but turning it into something useful, like predicting who will churn, has been difficult at best and elusive at worst.

But guess what recently invented tool is good at predictions:  AI

On March 22, Microsoft publicly unleashed their AI, Cortana, on the subject of Customer Churn.

If you, or someone you know is concerned about Customer Churn, you can now create an on-premises solution using SQL Server R Services utilizing the power of Cortana.  You can find more information on this here:  Customer Churn Prediction Template with SQL Server R Services

A deployment guide can be found here:  Technical Deployment Guide

And guidance on how to build your model can be found here: Retail Customer Churn Prediction Template

Azure Data Catalog - Toolbar

My last post was on the Azure Data Catalog Dashboard.  One of my favorite features of the dashboard was its simple and clean look.  The same is true about the Data Catalog Application in general.  Keeping things consistent between screens, Microsoft has the same tool bar in both the dashboard and throughout the application.

The tool bar contains all the administrative features of the data catalog

The home button will take you back to the dashboard at any time.

The Publish button will take you to the Publish your data now! Screen that we discussed in an earlier post. These buttons are more for navigation than for manipulation of any data.

 The glossary is where the Business Glossary resides (in the Standard Edition, not the free basic edition of Data Catalog).  The Business Glossary allows the user to define business terms and create a common lexicon to be used throughout the Data Catalog.  I will cover the Glossary in detail in a future post.

 Settings tools are the tools that we use to set the general parameters when creating the catalog.  These can also be changed in your Azure Portal but it is convenient to have access to them directly in the application.  From here, you can upgrade your subscription, or, change the location of the meta data for the catalog.  You can also upgrade to the Standard Edition from this screen when you realize how badly you want that Glossary.  All other settings that were created in our original How to Create a Data Catalog blog post are here so you can make any modifications needed.

 Just to have some fun I added a Portal Title to my Catalog and saved it in the settings.  The change shows up immediately displaying my company name. Now I have a branded Catalog!

 The final button on the toolbar is the User button which displays details about the user and catalog you are using.  The key features of this menu is the ability to clear Search History and Sign Out.

My Next post will explore the attributes of an Asset.