Thursday 23/02/2012
HomeWhat is Cimera?SolutionsDownloadsVideosContact
 Cimera
 What is Cimera?
  
 Is Cimera a database?
  
 Benefits
  
 Features
  
 Find what you need
  
 New opportunities Cimera brings
  
 System Requirements
  

where am I > Home > Features

Features - What does Cimera do?

User-defined information

Manages user-defined information items with user-defined attributes; whatever information that you need to store. We have jump-start packages to avoid wheels getting reinvented but Cimera is your custom made solution so you decide what is managed.

Relationships

Manages relationships between data items allowing drill-down into the organisation. No data is an island. An important aspect of data is its relationships to other data items.

  • For a PC I want to know what software is installed on it
  • For a customer I want to know what orders they have placed & what communication we have had.
  • For a customer complaint I want to know what service was at fault.

Workflow

Manages information through its lifecycle and enables workflow.

Fine-grained security.

Example of the rules you could set up to protect your data are:

  • Group A cannot view items of type “Orders”
  • Jim cannot create items of type “Customers”
  • Anyone with a specified role on Group B cannot update items of type “Employees”
  • Items of type “Report” cannot be updated when they do not have a status of “open”
  • Items of type “Complaint” can never be deleted by anyone
  • Fields X & Y cannot be changed when the status is “in testing”
  • No fields can be changed when the status is “closed”
  • Only Managers can promote (change the status) items of type “Authorisation”

Validation

The best way to keep your data clean is to prevent errors at entry time. Whether it’s simple validation (e.g. this must be a valid date and be at least 7 days in the future or 5 days in the past) or involves other fields too (e.g. this field must be at least twice as big as some other field) Cimera will prevent the pains that corrupt data cause.

Thresholds

Colouring can draw attention fields that are valid but in some way off-normal. A rule can be set such that if condition 1 is met then set use colour scheme 1, condition 2 is met then set use colour scheme 2 etc

Comprehensive audit trails

Who changed what field, from what, to what, when, and (if required) why.

Integrates with existing information repositories

Some information is best managed in specialist third party tools and not in Cimera, but this does not mean that the utopian ideal of “find all your information in one place” need be lost. Cimera Integrations allows the scheduled importing of external information, read-only, into its repository. From there, additional fields can be added (so “base” fields are maintained in the external tool and “additional” fields are maintained in Cimera) and relationships can be created. In this way Cimera could be used to maintain relationships between different kinds of data items that are each stored in separate third party tools.

File Attachments

Our philosophy of one place to go to find whatever you need extends to documents too. Simply attach to any data item the files relevant to that item and these are copied into the Cimera repository where they are unaffected by changes to, or deletion of, the original.

Interactive dashboards

See a summary of the work you are overseeing in a set of dashboards, click the part that interests you to drill down to the underlying data. Click again to graph that subset of data, change the grouping criteria & click to drill down again. It’s so powerful.

Fast Google-style searching and highlighting

No information management system is complete without the ability to search every data item and every attached document. Cimera also adds the ability to restrict the search to specified types of data item or particular fields. The results show the found text highlighted and ‘preview’ allows you to see the text found in any file attachments in a text format so you do not need to have the relevant software installed.

Remote access

Cimera’s client-server architecture means that not only does everyone on the Lan use the same data, anyone connecting through the internet also has access to the same shared information and files.

Fully extensible and customisable

If you want to add some menu items, automate a repetitive process, add triggers/events, create new screens, write reports or initiate external applications then Cimera will let you because it has been designed to be extended. Any .Net programmer can enhance Cimera’s functionality to make it meet your unique requirements.