Development tools maker Infragistics Corp. today is announcing the addition of data cataloging capabilities to its Slingshot collaboration software.

The company said the catalog can be used by non-technical users to unify data across an organization and create visual dashboards. Slingshot’s data catalog can be used with a wide variety of data sources, including the most popular databases, spreadsheets, cloud data warehouses and software-as-a-service applications.

The product is designed with both collaboration and security in mind, said Dean Guida, founder and chief executive of the 34-year-old Infragistics. “We connect to content stores like SharePoint, Dropbox and OneDrive and inherit their permissions,” he said. “You can pre-define who has access or people can request access on demand.” Works in progress can also be selectively shared with clients and business partners without compromising access privileges and at no additional charge, he said.

Five years in the making

Infragistics, which makes an assortment of application design and development tools that it says are used by more than 2 million developers, introduced Slingshot about a year ago after five years of development, Guida said. The company is on track to have between 500,000 and 700,000 active users within the next 12 months.

The platform is geared toward ease of use and so is the data catalog, Guida said. “Data catalogs have always been for IT people and data architects,” he said. “We built this for business people so you can search across your company and discover all the data without having  to wait for a business analyst to create a dashboard for you.” Users can curate the catalog and apply their own field names instead of the default descriptions found in source data.

A wide variety of prebuilt connectors are available and the new ones can be created within about two months of development, Guida said. Infragistics is also working on an application program interface that customers will be able to use to build their own connectors.

Simple workspace creation

Building a workspace is a drag-and-drop proposition and the company also furnishes templates for custom work plans using popular applications like Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks and Google Analytics. “If you do content and search engine optimization we’ll bring in all the digital ad information and website analytics that you need to get started quickly,” Guida said.

The company also built machine learning models that suggest dashboards and team member assignments. Machine learning is also used to summarize written discussions, suggest follow-up tasks and build an organization-wide knowledge graph.

Slingshot is sold on a freemium basis with three free workspaces and standard and enterprise editions priced at $12 and $24 per month, accordingly.

Image: Infragistics