products

A "products" page is not what you'd usually expect to find on a web site of a consulting company. After all, consulting is a service, not a product. But over the years, the same questions kept on coming again and again. People needed, e.g., a secure intranet solution that at the same time was a flexible document management solution. Sure, there are plenty of solutions available, both commercial and open-source, but each time a key requirement would not be met: no permissions or access rights management, no option to create user profiles for types of information, no interaction with databases, no option to save or customise the meta-information about documents, etc.

Atlas Intranet Server

The Atlas Intranet Server is an advanced and ready to use Intranet server application. It comes with an integrated permissions management that allows one to work with profiles for users and usergroups that can be set for each folder. A user or user group can have access to a folder as a reader (read access), author (read/write access), editor (read, write, edit, delete access) or administrator (like editor + ability to create subfolders and change users' rights). Individual access rights can be set to overrule user group access.

At the same time, AIS offers a flexible, yet powerful Document / Content Management System. Content categories are organised in "virtual folders" that can be organised in a tree structure that can easily be navigated. For each document, all kind of meta information can be stored: author, document date, upload date, key words, owner... As the content-tree is virtualised, (a reference to) the same document can easily be added to multiple folders, with different access rights in each.

AIS has a multiple language interface: the user can select his or her own language. (The screenshot below shows the same page in English and in Dutch, be it with a different "skin.") Additional languages can be added, easily.

AIS also is fully customisable. It works with templates which can be modified, and to which several "skins" can be applied. In the screenshot below, the same page uses the same template but with a different skin (and in a different language).

AIS also is secure. The actual information is not stored within the intranet folders but elsewhere, on a location that can accessed by the application, but not from the Net. It also works with an advanced session management that keeps track of user's IP addresses, previous sessions etc.

Hyperbase engine

Some of our customers also were interested in our Hyperbase content management system, which we use as our knowledge base. Basically, the Hyperbase engine lets you create your own encyclopaedia. All information is stored in a database that works with topics, content categories and internal and external links.

One of the main advantages of the Hyperbase engine is that it comes with powerful export modules that allow you to distribute your information freely, in several formats. The database itself can be accessed directly, or via ODBC, and can export its contents to HTML files, to a (fully operational) CHM file (complete with table of contents, index and search facility), or to a MySQL dump... Because of this, multiple interfaces for multiple distribution formats are possible.

The Hyperbase engine was the very first of its kind in the world. Already in 1995 it offered the option to export its whole contents to HTML. It still is an ideal tool for anyone who wants to create chm files.