Microsoft Purview offers a comprehensive suite of tools for governing your organization’s data through the solutions included in Purview Unified Platform. 

To catalog your data assets, you must first define your data map, which is composed of collections. However, you might encounter several related concepts that can be confusing when trying to streamline your organization’s data governance. 

In this article, we will explain the following concepts: Domains, Business Domains, Collections, Data Products, and Data Assets. We will also provide examples of how to use them correctly in your organization. 

Why “domains” and “business domains” in Purview? 

In the Classic Purview experience, an organization can have multiple accounts in its tenant. 

The Unified Purview Portal is intended to manage a single Microsoft Purview resource with multiple domains for your organization, and multiple accounts don’t exist in a single tenant.  

The goal is to replace multiple tenant accounts with multiple domains within a single tenant. 

Domains will continue to address the problems that accounts solve today and will also serve as the container for the collections and assets. 

Every Microsoft Purview Data Map starts with a default domain. 

Next figure shows a structure for a domain in the new Microsoft Purview Portal/Data Map.

The +New domain option appears as disabled for many users, but if you are a Purview Administrator you can add up to four more custom domains in your Microsoft Purview Data Map. How to manage domains and collections | Microsoft Learn

When you add a new domain, you can add new collections as well:

In above figure, you can see a Customer Service Domain and an Operations domain, in addition to the default domain.

New collections can be added under the custom domains, as in the default domain were.

The new experience uses a single, primary Microsoft Purview account, that represents a tenant-level/organization-wide account. In our example, this is “FabricPurviewDemo”, the name of our Purview Resource subscription, for managing our tenant towards unifying organization’s governance, policy, compliance, risk, and security.

If you already have multiple accounts in the classic experience, you’ll select a primary account when you upgrade to the new experience. Get ready for the next enhancement in Microsoft Purview governance solutions | Microsoft Learn

After you upgrade an existing account to the new experience, all other Microsoft Purview accounts in your tenant will continue to be accessed via the classic portal. Fine grained access control via roles and permissions at collection scopes will continue to function as-is after your accounts are upgraded. In addition, there are new tenant-level roles that can be managed in the new portal.

The Data Map view looks like the next figure shows, with three domains:

This Data Map contains collections under the default domain (FabricPurviewDemo).

We have three collections for scanning data assets in the desired sources, they are: Diseases, Human Resources and Finance. You can only scan one data source into a single collection.

In this figure you can notice Fabric as a data source for the Diseases Collection.

Human Resources and Finance are collections for scanning other data sources.

Operations and Customer Services are domains at the same level as the default domain and they don’t have collections added yet.

Business Domains 

While collections are intended to accept data assets directly from data sources through scanning processes, which is meaningless to business owners, business domains provide boundaries where governance policies reach data products. The goal is to empower an enterprise domain owner to manage their data products and concepts and to establish rules for their access, use, and distribution. With this goal in mind, you could establish many types of business domains: 

Fundamental business areas – human resources, sales, finance, supply chain, etc. Overarching subject areas – product, parts, etc. Boundaries based on organizational functions – customer experience, cloud supply chain, business intelligence, etc. 

Business Domains in Microsoft Purview provide a way to curate the data assets that are scanned in the Data Map solution. Curate your data with Business Concepts (youtube.com) 

Go to Data Catalog. Under Data Management, select Business Domains. 

Next figure shows several Business Domains defined in our organization. 

Figure above shows the use of Data estate mappings to assign collections to the selected Business Domain. You can select more than one collection to manage the scanned data assets of the selected collections as part of this business domain. 

You can further move data assets between business domains as needed. 

Some data sources permit scanning with a scoped approach, while others mandate full scans. Scoped scanning simplifies assigning collections to business domains, reducing the need to relocate assets, as full scans import a larger set of data assets. 

Details tab shows the Name, Type, Owner, Status (published, draft), Data quality score and Health actions about this business domain: 

The Roles tab allows to define business domain owners, business domain readers, data products owners, data steward, data catalog readers, data quality stewards, data quality readers and other profiles.  

To create a Business Domain, press the +New Business domain button. Then you will see a window like that: 

A business domain must have a name, a description, a type (Functional Unit, Line of business, Data Domain, Regulatory or Project).  

“Finance” and “Human Resources” are of type “Functional Unit” and are intended to group data assets discovered from Azure Databases containing several master tables about our clients, contracts, workers, incomes and expenses.  

Our business domain “Diseases” is of type “Data Domain” and is intended to group data assets discovered in our Fabric tenant, which contains some reports, semantic models, data pipelines, two data warehouses, and a Lakehouse. All these data assets will be maintained with policies and roles to control access within our organization and allow stakeholders to manage them using medical sciences terms. 

On your business domain’s detail page, you can see the Business concepts section. Here you can see your data products, glossary terms, objective and key results (OKRs), critical data elements and custom attributes. You can go through the cards to create all of them about a specific business domain.

Let’s continue with these concepts and some examples about them.

Data Products 

A data product is a set of data assets discovered in one or more data sources that serve a meaningful business purpose and support end users’ specific needs. 

Managing data as a product offers numerous benefits for both businesses and users, among these are: facilitate cross-functional collaboration and reduce the time and effort to find, process and analyze data by owners. 

The data product provides context for these assets, grouping them under a use case for data consumers. A business domain can house many data products, but a data product is managed by a single business domain.  

Next figure shows the details about the Diseases Business Domain at the right.  

Selecting Go to data products and + New data product you can define as many Data Products as you need for that business domain. How to create and manage data products (Preview) | Microsoft Learn

Next figure shows adding a new Data Product in the Diseases Business Domain.  

In this tab you must define a name, a description, the type and the owner. The selected type of our data product can be “Dataset”, according to the type of data assets this data product will contain. 

In the second tab you must define Business Details. 

At this point you can follow a wizard to define the purpose and other details about this data product. The last wizard screen allows you to add data assets from the assigned collections or define the access policy. 

Next figure shows adding data assets: 

You can filter data by type on the left and add the desired data assets by checking them.  

Depending on the type, Microsoft Purview finds all data assets of the type defined for the Data Product. You can apply filters and move through pages to select the appropriate data assets. 

Next figure shows the Data Product created in the Diseases Business Domain: 

On the same screen, you can observe three data assets, and five glossary terms added to this data product. Glossary terms are defined for the entire business domain. You must select the appropriate terms from this set to be used by users when exploring the organization’s data estate. 

OKR (Objective-Key-Result) are defined for the business domain and are linked to Data Products for providing context. 

One OKR (Objective-Key-Result) was defined as “Decrease the number of seek people in most common diseases”. It was linked to “Sick people by diseases and regions”.

One contact was defined to be available to users for asking about this data product. 

Critical Data Elements are columns from data assets that are critical pieces of information that are necessary for decision making, and so need to be governed with the highest care. They are defined at business domain level in the Business Domain’s Details tab, with data quality purpose. How to create and manage critical data (Preview) | Microsoft Learn. In our Diseases business domain, one example can be the Patient ID.

We’ve associated five data assets in Finance Reports Data Product and one Term, selected from the glossary terms defined in Finance Business Domain: 

See that the above data product is of type “Dashboards/Reports”. 

You can add as many data assets, terms, OKRs and contacts as needed, depending on your organization needs and size, while the data product is unpublished. Owners can make published data products unpublished to add more data assets, terms, OKRs and critical data elements. 

After creation, you can go to Manage Policies and then define several policies for accessing a Data Product. 

Come back to “Sick people by diseases and regions” Data Product and press “Manage Policies”. 

Among other features, the Preview Access Form in the Policies allows you to define how other users can request access to this Data Product, for example: 

You can observe in next figure the list of Data Products we’ve created: 

One data product in Finance Business Domain (“Finance Reports”) Two data products in Diseases Business Domain (“Medicines” and “Sick people by diseases and regions”) “Team and Members” in the Company Projects Business Domain “Workers” in Human Resources Business Domain 

Summarizing concepts 

Data Map is the solution where you plan your domains and collections for accepting data assets directly from data sources. Scanning process can be scoped or not depending on the data source.  

Domains are managed in the Data Map to define containers for collections and assets.

Business domains are defined and mapped with the desired Collections in Data Catalog.  

Business Domains are composed by a set of business concepts, they are:

Data Products,  Glossary terms,  OKRs and  Critical Data. 

Data products are composed of related data assets discovered by scanning sources in the data map (you may need to select data assets from more than one source) and curated in the Data Catalog, to satisfy end user’s needs.

Glossary Terms and OKRs are defined at business domain level but are linked to Data Products to provide context.

Critical Data are defined for managing data quality as key purpose. 

Data Products defined in Diseases Business Domain include several reports, semantic models, data pipelines, and a Lakehouse. These assets reside in a Fabric tenant (the data source) and were selected from the scanned data assets among different Fabric’s workspaces. 

We have curated the data products with policies and roles to control their access by users within our organization, as well as with glossary terms to make these assets more readable and easier to find for physicians and other stakeholders. 

Learn more: 

Understand domains in the Microsoft Purview Data Map | Microsoft Learn 

How to manage domains and collections | Microsoft Learn 

Microsoft Purview collections architecture and best practices | Microsoft Learn 

Permissions in new Microsoft Purview Data Catalog preview | Microsoft Learn 

Get ready for the next enhancement in Microsoft Purview governance solutions | Microsoft Learn 

Business domains in Microsoft Purview (Preview) | Microsoft Learn 

Data products in Microsoft Purview (Preview) | Microsoft Learn 

How to configure and manage data catalog access policies (Preview) | Microsoft Learn 

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