Metrici Portal features

Web pages

All data in Metrici can be accessed as web pages. These can be simple text-based pages, or complex layouts with pictures, video, tables, charts and interactive components.

Forms

Data in Metrici is created and maintained using web forms. These provide text input and standard, easy-to-use components for selecting options and managing lists, and complex controls such as spreadsheet-like grids and image upload.

Mobile-friendly

Web pages and forms are responsive, and automatically resize to work well on mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

Automated user interface

Web page and form layout is derived from the data and fully automated. No coding is required to build new types of pages and forms.

Web pages are defined by comprehensive metadata which provides a rich set of options for controlling appearance and behaviour of the user interface.

Themes

Metrici provides a selection of standard themes that you can select with a single click.

Metrici themes use the industry standard Twitter Bootstrap framework, and you can use a Bootstrap theme defined for another website or easily create a new one.

File upload and download

Metrici supports secure file upload and download, including support for multi-gigabyte files, letting you incorporate files into your solution.

Image galleries

Metrici can automatically resize uploaded images and show your images in a gallery, including the creation of thumbnail images for selecting and identifying images.

Tabbed interface

Metrici web pages and forms can be broken down into sections, presented as separate tabs at the top of the page. This makes it easy to structure complex information into something more digestible.

WYSIWYG editor

Metrici provides a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor for maintaining page content and other text.

Wiki

Metrici pages can use wiki-like features to create links between pages and to show pictures on pages.

Metrici permissions and user management allow you to create a wiki that can be used by just you, a few colleagues, or a much wider group.

Workbench

For developers, the Metrici Workbench provides a familiar IDE-like environment for developing solutions, complete with highlighting code editors and contextual help, allowing you to create and test complete Metrici solutions from within your browser.

Search

Metrici search performs advanced, full-text search across all your data. The search is secure – your private data never shows up in other people's searches.

You can selectively switch off searching, and limit the scope of the search, allowing you to integrate custom search into your solution.

Version management

All Metrici data and metadata can be versioned to preserve older versions of data and protect them from change. This is particularly useful when creating new solutions, as it allows you to develop and test new solutions without disrupting existing users.

Publishing

Any data within Metrici can be made available for public access. This makes it really easy to create a public-facing website in Metrici, while keeping other data private.

Data integrity

Metrici validates all data input to make sure it conforms to specification. It maintains links between different data items, and automatically updates these links if items are moved.

Before changes are made, Metrici will check their impact and warn you of any adverse side-effects.

Localization

All Metrici pages can be presented in multiple languages using built-in translation tools, making it easy to provide applications for global audiences. Dates and times can be shown in local formats and timezones.

Secure servers

Metrici is run from secure servers held in a secure ISO 27001 data centres. Backups are taken regularly throughout the day, and data encrypted before being copied to secure cloud servers for an independent backup. Your data is safe.

256-bit SSL

Metrici supports 256-bit SSL to make sure that your connection to the service is secure.

PCI DSS level 3

Metrici is scanned regularly to test for compliance against the PCI DSS level 3 payment card industry security standards for organisations processing up to 1,000,000 credit card transacitons per year.

Data ownership

All data within Metrici is clearly owned, and the owner must grant access before anyone else can see their data.

Granular permissions

Permission to use data can be controlled very finely, down to different sorts of permissions (such as read or update) on individual pages.

Rule-based, role-based permissions

In addition to granular permissions, Metrici lets you set rules that define which roles can perform which actions on your data, and then assign people or groups to those roles. These permissions are then automatically applied to new data.

This makes it easy to manage complex permissions across large bodies of data.

Built-in auditing

All data in Metrici is stamped with the user and time when it was created and when it was last modified. This is maintained at the individual field level, providing exceptionally fine-grained auditing information.

Logs are maintained of all significant updates and of all sign in attempts, successful and unsuccessful.

User management

Each Metrici account manages its own users.

Users can be arranged into groups, and managemenent of those groups further delegated if required.

Session protection

Session protection is similar to Windows User Access Control (UAC), and disallows potentially disruptive actions without the user re-entering their password.

Session protection can be integrated into solutions to provide an additional level of security for powerful functions.

Content filtering

All web content entered into Metrici, or generated by user-defined scripts, is run through strong content filtering to remove scripting and other content that could be used for attacks. Users can not accidentally or deliberately create problematic content in Metrici.

Permission controls

Users can only grant permissions to other users in their account. Where multiple user groups are used, these permissions can be restricted further.

This means that users can not accidentally or deliberately give access to secure data outside the organisation.

Where users do make data public, only limited read permissions can be granted. To preserve anonymity, user credentials are hidden when accessing content published by other accounts.

Linked users

Users in one account can be linked to users in another account, allowing a user to access a different account without signing in again. However, when they are working in another account, permissions and data access rights are completely separated. This provides the convenience of single sign on but without compromising data security.

Theme controls

Metrici themes control what browser-based resources, such as JavaScript, are available to Metrici. This provides a controlled method for introducing browser-based functionality.

Metrici provides additional controls when installing themes to make sure that users do not inadvertently install untrusted themes.

JSON Web Tokens

Metrici can issue JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) using OAuth 2.0-compatible calls to allow Metrici to act as an authorisation server for external APIs, giving joined-up security for applications involving Metrici and other applications.

Monitoring

Metrici is regularly scanned by an independent third party to ensure that it is not susceptible to web attacks.

Custom data types

Metrici's metadata-driven approach lets you define new types of data, including what data is stored, what it looks like, and how it behaves.

Inheritance

Metrici supports inheritance between data, both for the metadata and the data itself. This makes it easy to reuse and extend existing functionality.

Complex structures

Metrici's extensible data-driven approach is particulary powerful for defining complex data structures, and for data structures the definition of which is variable (for example, on a survey form).

As well as holding data types and links between data, Metrici maintains a hierarchical view of data which is useful for representing containers and for managing permissions.

Scripting API

You can build large and complex Metrici solutions without coding.

Metrici also provide a comprehensive scripting API, which allows you to write JavaScript that will run securely on the server.

This can be used for custom calculations and for creating new types of user interface component.

The scripting API is fully sandboxed and secured. Other people can not access your data through the scripting API.

Derived data

Metrici creates a copy of the data originally entered on forms, called "derived data". Derived data is automatically recalculated when the original data is changed.

Calculations can be applied to the derived data, using the scripting API. This makes is possible to pre-populate complex calculations, which can speed up data access by orders of magnitude.

Derived data is very powerful and is the basis for many solutions within Metrici.

Background calculations

Metrici performs data derivation and other calculations in the background, and solutions can schedule processes to occur in the background.

This means that solutions can maintain structures and present users with up-to-date information while maintaining fast response times.

Triggers

Using the scripting API, triggers can be attached to data events such as creation, modification and deletion, to maintain complex structures and to respond to user activity.

Custom themes

Metrici uses the industry-standard Twitter Boostrap styling, augmented with the FontAwesome icon set.

You can create new Metrici themes, either from an existing Bootstrap theme, or by creating one from scratch. Themes provide complete control over the browser experience, from simple styling, addition of new or alternative browser-based functionality, or to provide different layouts and styling for different international audiences.

You can then install this for yourself, for everyone in your account, or offer it as a product to others.

Web services

Web services allow Metrici applications to be easily integrated with other solutions.

All Metrici functionality is available as XML-based services, accessible through a secure web services interface. Metrici applications can also call out to web services provided by other solutions.

Web services can be called from a browser to support interactive UI components.

Web services can be called from other systems to pass data into Metrici or extract data from Metrici.

Using the scripting API, you can write your own web services to provide a custom API to your solution.

The Metrici web services interface provides exciting possiblities. For example, you could use it to provide a data sharing and persistence layer to a mobile app.

Browser scripting

As well as the scripting API, you can use browser-based scripts as part of your solution.

The browser-based scripts, and the rules for when they should applied, are defined using a custom theme, giving you control over who can use your scripts.

Drag and drop

Data links and file uploads within Metrici are supported by browser-based drag-and-drop components, with fallbacks for browsers that don't support these.

Tags

All data in Metrici can be tagged to categorise the data and for quick retrieval.

Process management

Metrici provides a process execution engine which can be used to manage processes, such as data life cycles or more complex business processes.

Navigation

Navigation features allow menus and tree navigation to be added to Metrici solutions.

The menus as tree navigation automatically tailor their content to the data being shown.

Notifications

Notification components allow solutions to easily create user alerts and notifications. These can be configured to send emails or perform other actions to keep users up-to-date with what's going on in their solutions.

Product packaging

Metrici solutions can be packaged and offered to other organisations or individuals, either for free or paid for.

Packaged products can be made available through the Metrici application store.

Branding/white label

You can rebrand and restyle Metrici and present it as your own solution. You can:

Email

Metrici provides an outgoing email interface, allowing you to incorporate email notifications into your solution.

Image handling

Metrici provides resizing functions for uploaded images, simplifying the image handling in solutions that require pictures.

Social media

You can add links for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more so that your visitors can share with their contacts, and you can track what's most popular.

Expert system

Metrici incorporates an expert system engine, allowing you to create rule-based processing and analysis.

This can be used to create advisory applications.

Data tables

Metrici can build in-memory table structures, and persist them to the data store. Tables can be built simply by defining the data sources and the required columns.

Table manipulation functions, such as filtering, joining and aggregation, can be used to maintain the tables.

Dependency processing can be used to incrementally update tables as the base data changes, ensuring that tables are always up to date while maintaining good user response times.

Table display

Metrici provides many options for displaying tabular data, such as filtering, sorting and pagination.

Graphs, charts and maps

Metrici provides charting functions, such as time series, pie chart, line chart, bar chart, scatter chart and map-based charts.

The charting functions are extensible and new chart types can be added.

Dashboards and reporting

Metrici layout features, table handling and charting can be used to create compelling dashboards and reports.

Content injection

If you want an ad-supported web page or service offering, you can configure Metrici to inject advertisting or other content into completed pages. This can target individual parts of individual pages, or large groups of pages, without modifying the page source.

Custom domains

Access Metrici through your own domain name, and use this to control theming, branding, home pages and adverts.

Import/export

Metrici provides comprehensive data export and import functions, using XML, JSON, comma-separated values (CSV) and Microsoft Excel files, or pasting to and from spreadsheet programs.

Cloud-based file storage

Uploaded files are encrypted and held on a cloud-based file storage service, and are cached for rapid retrieval.

This means that Metrici can efficiently hold very large volumes of files, without compromising access times.

Excel fles

Read and write Excel files with the built-in Excel utilities.

PDF

Create PDF files, and set or read data from PDF forms.

ZIP files

You can upload zip files and provide access to the entries ("files") within them.

This can be a good way of publishing existing collections of files, or for providing access to resources needed by your solution, such as images, CSS and JavaScript.

When downloading multiple files from Metrici, the user can be given the option to download them as a single ZIP file.

Assessment and surveys

Metrici provides rich, deep and mature support for assessment and survey solutions. This covers the management of assessment processes, definition of questions and questionnaires, and analysis and reporting.

Documentation

Metrici functionality is comprehensively documented in the development guide.