IRIS Enterprise

Effortlessly create forms

IRIS makes it super easy to create forms. It allows you to think just about the content and the organization and order.

Designing a form to gather and therefore structure data is about thinking what is needed and how it relates to existing data

It is best created by someone in need of this data, someone who understands it, but in standard software development it is most often created by a developer many levels removed from the actual need.

IRIS also allows iterating on a forms content without developer involvement to ensure it actually delivers the expected value and improve on it.

Documents created based on a specific version of a form will remain the way they were by default. No automatic upgrade adding fields or changing structure will be done automatically. It is possible of course but most of the time it just doesn't make sense.

Just because e.g a case form suddenly requires a new field doesn't mean pre-existing data should suddenly also get this field as if it had always been there. In standard development this is often the case though. Updates often cause huge data upgrades to make existing data conform to new forms and bog down the servers for the duration of this upgrade.

IRIS is more aligned with how forms used to work in the real world, where it is possible to make some changes without external overhead. Getting agreement on changes inside a business often already requires consensus which includes internal processes and getting developers on board for any kind of change just slows everything down.

Keeping everything

All documents created using forms in IRIS keep a full history automatically. Thus any document can be inspected at any time to show a list of all previous states the document was in.

When the history of a single document isn't enough, an entire tree or group of documents as they appeared together can be snapshotted and kept for future reference. This isn't strictly necessary since it could always be reconstructed from the history of each individual document, but this way a full tree of documents can be used to offer user features such as signing off on a set of related changes.

Finding made easy

All recent version of all documents are automatically full-text indexed. We use the most advanced full text search engine available this side of Google to allow to search of everything.

The highly structured nature of form based data gives us an extra advantage to allow not only searching but also perform aggregations and faceting.

Since full-text search is integrated from the outset it will only search through data that the specific user actually has access to.

Make it beautiful

Due to the pretty default styles included in IRIS most forms can be used right away, but for the 20% of forms that users actually spend at least 80% of their time on a designer can make it beautiful.

The tools to design forms and content are built right into IRIS and based on HTML5 / CSS and give immediate feedback

Most importantly a Designer can design actual live data already entered into the system and even create new example data with the default UI IRIS provides for all data.

Fine-tuning the Design is often performed in a session alongside actual Users or Stakeholders. No need for operations or developers to get involved.

Allow Change

Changes to Forms,Designs and all the other parts of IRIS require a Change-Management Strategy.

In a production system no application level changes are allowed by default. But IRIS is capable of taking almost zero-overhead copies of the production system in constant time. That means business can allow many more people to experiment and propose changes.

Users without the Right to deploy directly, can now demo their Change and propose it for deployment to the team responsible.

And once its time to perform the deployment of Changes into the production system a staging system is created with most up-to-date data and kept in sync with the production machine. Changes are imported and can be verified. When its time to go live, the changes go into production with basically no downtime (even no downtime is possible).

IRIS is designed to allow many small changes quickly instead of bulk changes every month.

Usable Backups

Important data must be backed up, but most backups strategies are incomplete. They take too long or put too much load on the production machine. Also the backups are often not verifiable without a huge amount of work.

Our standard installation of IRIS (hosted or on-premises) use ZFS to take continuous point-in-time snapshots of the entire production system with practically no overhead and transport these to secondary servers. These machines are complete copies and can always be brought live or be be made available under a different name.

The amount of extra space needed to get full and differential backups is just the total deployment size * number of backups + number of bytes changes between snapshots.

On top of that, all data and all differential snapshots are block per block cryptographically signed to ensure data integrity on top of the underlying storage mirrors.

Ensure Access for only the right Users

Not every User should be allowed to see everything in the system even if they do have access in principle. For example Technical Support team members or Designers should be allowed access to documents but not know see actual credit card information or Customer names.

In IRIS form fields can be marked confidential and these data in these fields are not visible and not searchable unless necessary. In a deployment system these fields are normally blacked out for example.

Predictable Access

Securing data is all about Trust in the configuration. When its not easily possible to predict what a User can do, or why a User can or cannot access something it is unpredictable.

IRIS follows the same security philosophy as it has been in the real world. We use Locks and Keys.

Since documents created in IRIS are stored in a strong hierarchical order a Lock can be placed on any subtree. For example a folder called 'Marketing' can be locked using a Lock called 'Marketing'. Only Users with the appropriate Key to unlock this specific Lock can now even see any data in there. This includes global Full-Text searches

Having been assigned a key gives a User access to anything locked with that key an contained inside. With a locked room, having the correct key allows entering it. Just having the key though does not give you the right to take away anything or use the phone. Therefore a given key is often combined with a list of Rights the User is allowed to perform which are normally grouped into Roles. In the real world an assistant might be allowed to enter the managers room, but not use the computer inside or even take away anything.