The Metrici Portal is a web-based system for developing and running applications.
Each organisation that uses the portal has an account, and individual users have sign ins to their organisation's account.
The portal can support multiple organisation's accounts from one server, and the service is typically delivered in this way, but can also be delivered with different organisations running accounts on their own servers.
Each account can have products installed within it.
The process automation is enabled through a "process client" product, and each account needs this installed.
The process client provides a connection method to create connections between the process client in one organisation's account and the process client in another organisation's account. The connections are bilateral – you need one connection for each partner, which reflects the agreements you have to work with each other organisation. The connections are secured using key pairs, not sign in credentials, which means that partner organisations never get sign in access to your account.
The individual processes within the process client are managed through "process workers", or "workers" for short. Workers hold the process definition, data and process state, and are run by a process execution engine which interprets the process definition to provide meaningful user functions. Workers are arranged into groups for management and to control access.
The process client does not provide any process functionality (such as defining processes or holding data), and instead uses separate applications, known as "process modules". Process modules are connected to the process client using the same connection method used to connect one organisation to another.
A typical process module will define processes that can be split into parts, part to be run by the owning organisation, and part to be sent to a partner and run by them. This means that only one organisation – the owner of the process – installs the process module. The processes sent to other parties are subject to strict security controls to make sure that they cannot access data or perform actions outside of the worker.
The workers in different organisations that run each part of the process share a common process identifier, allowing the connection to pass messages securely between them.