The tool is easy to use. You can think of it as a better SSMS is some instances. As part of your ETL (Extract Transform Load), you can create some table for data augmentation in your data warehouse. The data in this table is not part of your extraction (source system). However, the data in this table needs to be maintained. If I create this table in MDS I can easily use Excel once the plug-in is installed, to maintain the table. MDS can be used to maintain all reference data for the EDW as well.

MDS has helped our organization by speeding up the creation of metadata, especially in cases where we need to integrate and clean data from various sources for business intelligence. It speeds up our business intelligence platform development.

We have only recently started using Microsoft MDS for our master data management. So far, only two or three of us are testing it out. It's not a big project yet, just trying things out.

We are still in the testing phase. But once we start implementing it for clients, a lot more people will be using it.

It enables data stewards to directly interact with data on a web site or Excel without building a custom solution. This includes data stewards getting notification emails automatically when new data is loaded including a link to the specific data that needs to be updated. It also has a built-in single level of approval management that is used where versions of data need to be approved prior to publishing. The end result is more consistent data, more consistent data and fewer data silos.

Reference data management is integrated via using standard automated ETL processes extracting from the published database views. This eliminates the need for one-off, silo'd and uncontrolled data management. 

We have been able to have one true copy of data with Master Data Services. It's improved our organization by removing redundancies. It has reduced the duplication across a number of different databases.

This product provides a robust, flexible, and secure way for my organization and our customers to manage master data without the need to write code. MDS provides excellent integration options and a range of features such as auditing, trace-ability, and change capture.