Introducing tags - now in public preview.
When it comes to data discovery and management, the modern data estate presents a set of daunting challenges for organizations and admins. An explosion in data sources coupled with rapid movement to the cloud is accommodating admins of all type, as well as CDOs and data stewards busy. To meet these challenges, organizations need tools to help them enrich, control, and manage the metadata added to the data estate, so they can better facilitate data discoverability, trust, and reuse amongst users.
Microsoft Fabric’s modern data mesh architecture was designed to solve these challenges. Fabric already provides the ability to organize data into a federated set of domains and sub-domains (domains blog), helping reduce data swamps and data silos in your org. Since launching, the response to the domains feature has been amazing and we’ve seen impressive uptake across Fortune 500 organizations and beyond. Consistent feedback has been an appreciation of this feature set, but also the desire for more.
To enable even more flexibility in how you structure and manage your data estate, we are introducing an all-new Fabric feature, Tags in preview. This is a much-requested addition to Fabric, and one we’re excited to share.
By providing the ability to apply additional metadata to items in Fabric, tags will help admins categorize and organize data, enhancing the searchability of your data and boosting success rates and efficiency for end users.
How tags work
In our tagging solution, admins are empowered to create an open list of tags for use across the organization. These tags can then be applied by data owners, who best know how to categorize their own data. Once tags are applied, any user in the org can use them to filter or search for the most relevant content.
Get started with Tags in Fabric
Go to the Admin portal and click on the Tags tab.
Click the Create new button.
In the dialog that opens, enter the new tag name and click Create.
Note: You can create multiple tags at once, enter the tag name and separate it with comma.
Now you have a list of tags created.
Users can now apply those tags to their items.
Apply Tags
Users with write permissions and up can select one or more tags from the pre-defined list and apply it on an item.
In item settings go to Tags tab.
Select the tags relevant to your item, you can see all the tags applied on the item automatically.
NOTE: Item can have up to 10 tags applied.
Optimized Discoverability
Once the item has tags applied, an icon will be shown next to the item name.
You can filter by tags in the workspace list and in OneLake data hub.
You will see the applied tags in item details, the flyout card and lineage view.
You can also search by tags and see all the relevant results with additional metadata (item owner and item location).
Tags are a crucial element for implementing data mesh architecture, allowing additional details to be added at the item level, across workspaces and domains. This assists data consumers in effortlessly discovering the content they require.
To further discuss the capabilities of the tags feature and the challenges it can solve in your organization we invite you to reach out to us at FabricTags@microsoft.com.