Agent Groups — Manage Your Data Project With Ease

We’re always excited to announce new features, but today’s release is one we’ve been looking forward to for some time: agent groups.

If you manage any projects that involve multiple Mozenda agents, agent groups will bring many improvements to your workflow.

What Is an Agent Group?

In a nutshell, an agent group allows you to easily manage multiple agents by defining a template for new fields, consolidating existing fields, specifying default agent settings, and creating shared views. Instead of managing each agent individually, settings and fields can be configured once then used automatically in new agents or manually synced to existing agents.

Agent groups can be started from scratch for a new project or created using one or more existing agents.

Benefits Breakdown

Agent groups provide a new way of approaching project management in Mozenda. Let’s cover the advantages this new feature brings to the table:

1. Improve Data QualityProjects that use multiple agents frequently gather similar data from different websites. Reconciling the field names and formats between existing agents can be cumbersome, especially when there is a lot of data to sort through.By creating a new agent group (or adding existing agents to an agent group), you can easily combine multiple fields and clean up the data that they gather. This is similar to what you can currently do with combined collections, but adding agents to an agent group and syncing the fields will update the names and formats in each agent, not just the combined collection.
2. Promote ConsistencyKeeping field names consistent between agents can now be done easily using field templates. After a template has been defined for an agent group, it can be used to sync agent fields to match the template and also used in the Agent Builder to streamline the process of creating new agents with identical field names.
3. Specify Default SettingsPreviously, most settings related to schedules, notifications, and publishing had to be changed on a per-agent basis. With agent groups, you can specify default agent settings to be inherited by new agents created within the agent group and synchronized with existing agents added to the group.Here are all the agent settings that can be configured using an agent group:
   • Harvesting
   • Schedule
   • Notifications
   • Publishing
4. Share ViewsViews have been around in Mozenda for some time, allowing users to filter the data that appears in a finished file. Much like the settings mentioned above, these views were configured on a per-agent basis, which can take time for agents that collect a large amount of data. Sharing views means that you can create a view with the fields in the desired order once and then display the data from the entire agent group using the shared view.

Stay Tuned!

There’s so much to talk about with this new release that we’re putting on a webinar to cover the details and answer questions from our users. The webinar will take place Thursday, November 17 at 9:00 MDT:

Register Now

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