Sounds interesting @PGookin, could be useful for us. 
I do think some more information is needed. Can you share (a link to the) documentation? I wonder how we can use this.
- Can we use the search UI/API to easily view the metadata of the roles?
- Can we use search to get all roles that match a query, where the query can reference the metadata? This would help in multiple areas. Reporting, but also triggering certification campaigns based of the metadata.
- Can users in the search of the request center find roles based on the metadata?
- Will the requesters see the metadata?
- Can we choose which metadata has a fixed number of possibilities and which metadata allows data in free format? Can those creating roles (either through UI or API) specify the metadata immediately?
- What are the limitations of this? How many metadata attributes can we define per role. How many values can we assign to the same role per attribute? Tags are useless for us, due to these limits (especially the last one):
6.1 You can have up to 500 different tags in your tenant.
6.2 You can apply up to 30 tags to one object.
6.3 You can have up to 10,000 tag associations, pairings of 1 tag to 1 object, in your tenant.
The release schedule does not mention dates specifically for sandbox environments and production environments. Can you give this information? Or are they released on all environment levels at once?
Also I would like to emphasize again that timing of these announcements are important. This announcement arrived on the 8th of October (it says it was created on the 2nd of October, but then it was probably not visible for end users yet, and even that I would consider too late compared to the release date), while releasing apparently started on the 3th of October. This means we lost the possibility of properly testing this new functionality before the release to production and perhaps raise issues, concerns or bugs to you and perhaps to communicate and potentially train our relevant end users. Please release announcements before the staging occurs such that we can start planning on this from our side.
Kind regards,
Angelo