Introduction

Around the data steward world, there is a desire for something innovative, fresh, powerful, and most importantly, secure! Large corporations are constantly searching for tools to streamline their workflow – a tool that will make their employees more efficient and reduce the ‘busy work’ of analytics. UNISON will be the platform that will take the world of data by force. UNISON is Melissa’s forward-thinking platform that is designed from the ground-up to be used to take your data through the entire data quality cycle.

UNISON wraps all of Melissa’s on-prem tools into one platform, making it fast, easy, and most importantly, secure! The security features make UNISON ideal for fintech, healthcare and other industries where the management of sensitive data means that it can’t leave the organization.

Architecture

UNISON is a platform that is built using the power of containerization with Docker. UNISON is designed as a web-based application with its’ own login portal that can be accessed entirely using the intranet. This next-generation platform unifies all of Melissa’s data cleansing technologies through its straightforward, modern (yet powerful) user interface.

UNISON is a centralized solution for creating simple to complex data quality tasks that allow for connection to multiple RDBMS platforms, scheduling jobs, visualizing reports/analytics, project collaboration and more.  UNISON was conceived with the principle of uncompromised speed and security in mind – all while streamlining the data preparation process and giving the user the tools needed to do a thorough analysis of their datasets.

Perhaps the strongest point in its architecture is the scalability. UNISON is able scale with your corporation’s demands – do you have a data set of hundreds of records? Thousands? Millions? UNISON is also able to be easily installed across multiple servers, allowing you to begin scaling horizontally to meet business demands, rather than just vertically.

Functionality

As of now, the core functionality of UNISON resides in contact data verification. UNISON can validate U.S. and Canadian addresses, perform aggressive address correction, append latitude/longitude coordinates and Census data, validate and standardize email addresses and phone numbers, and validate and parse through full names. However, this is just the launch pad for the application – Melissa plans to integrate functionalities that allow you to profile, cleanse and dedupe your data.

More importantly, Melissa will flesh out its report system to give you the ability to drill down to a record level list of each section of the report, so you can see exactly what set of records contains which result codes.  You are then able to schedule jobs to be run as often as needed, and have the ability to filter data to multiple locations based on our result codes.

Effortless Updates

The administrator of a client’s installation of UNISON will be in charge of maintaining data and software updates. With that in mind, Melissa has made it easy to go through both of these processes. UNISON will notify the administrator when a new update is available, instructing you on how to perform these updates. Should a requirement exist that requires the UNISON ecosystem to be disconnected entirely from the internet, Melissa can send out the data required with instructions on how to perform the update.

Ease of Implementation

UNISON enables your company to reduce implementation time and completely eliminate development time. The only implementation work required is to download the installer and have your administrator install the product to a dedicated server. Once the product is installed, the administrator can choose to integrate UNISON within the company’s LDAP system to use preexisting logins. Alternatively, the administrator can create UNISON account logins for the data stewards to use. Once your preferred form of login is set up, you’re ready to begin processing projects.

 For additional information, please visit our Wiki.