Best Practices for Document Hubs

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

In General Availability from Alation version 2024.3.2

In Public Preview from Alation version 2024.1 to 2024.3.1

Document Hubs are Alation’s way of organizing written content that provides context for your data. Documents in Alation form a semantic layer over your data assets, clarifying relationships and enhancing discoverability. Here are some best practices for creating and managing information in Document Hubs.

Define Types of Content

Document hubs should be based on a type of content rather than business units. Basing your hubs on content type ensures that hubs are broadly applicable across your business and helps limit the number of hubs that appear in the catalog navigation. If you have too many document hubs, the navigation and search experience become too crowded, making it harder to find relevant content and making the catalog harder to use.

Once you’ve defined your content types, you can use folders to separate documents by business unit and govern who has access to specific folders based on their business unit.

For example, you may need to document definitions for your company’s metrics. Since metric definitions could be useful to all your business units, you create a document hub and name it Metrics. Within the Metrics document hub, you create a folder for each business unit that needs to define metrics—Finance Metrics, R&D Metrics, and so forth. If desired, you can restrict the visibility of each folder to user groups belonging to the appropriate business unit. Within their respective folders, each business unit can now create documents defining their own metrics.

As another example, you may need documentation for business practices. In this context, you might label folders as Business Plans, Go To Market Plans, or Data Applications. These documentation types could be used across multiple business units.

Make Names Meaningful

Document hubs all work the same, but you can assign customized names to your hubs, folders, and documents based on your business needs. These custom names appear in the Alation navigation and search features. Ensure that:

  • Names are meaningful for your organization

  • Names are unique across all document hubs

For example, if a document hub is meant to hold metric definitions, you could name your document hub Metrics. Your folders could be named after business units like Finance Metrics or R&D Metrics, or they could be named after lines of business or other categories that you define.

More Help

For detailed information on working with Document Hubs, see: