Platform Components

Platform Components

Like most enterprise request management platforms, the Kinetic Platform uses 20 common components of business software. These components can be separated into two groups: a set of four Key Platform Pillars, and a list of secondary components that are used throughout the Platform.

Portals

End users interact with Kinetic-built apps through Portals. Our headless design makes it possible to use any front-end web development toolkit to meet your project's exact needs.

In other cases, portals may display a list of records the user needs to fill out, such as a list of tasks that need to be completed. In this case, the portal would query the Kinetic Platform's Submissions API to retrieve a list of relevant submissions and present them to the user in a table.

Portals are often designed as a collection of forms that can be submitted by end users. In that case, a portal would query Kinetic's Forms API to retrieve a list of forms and present them to the user. When a user navigates to a form, the form gets rendered inside the portal.

Forms

Forms are the primary data storage and rendering mechanism in the Kinetic Platform. Forms are used to collect, validate, and store data from end users and workflows. You can even pull data from other systems and display and/or store it in the Platform.

Our low-code drag-and-drop designer leverages the following enterprise request management components to create and maintain forms:

• Data management: Lets you configure form fields to ensure consistency and data integrity. For example, you might configure a field to require emails to use a [email protected] format.
• Rule enforcement: Lets you enforce rule sets on data records. For example, you might require that users fill in a name, date, and contact number when entering a work order.

Built for Extension

In keeping with our Common Frameworks philosophy, we made Kinetic Forms extendable with languages like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. This additional flexibility lets you enhance the look and feel of your forms, write custom validations to ensure clean data is being captured, and otherwise customize your forms to fit your needs.

Datastore Forms

Along with the forms described above, which are designed to capture transactional data with a defined life cycle (such as a work order), Kinetic lets you house referential data without a defined lifecycle (such as a list of vendors) through the use of datastore forms. These forms are designed to use well-defined querying patterns and play a huge role in the performance of the Kinetic database.

Workflows

When you think about it, most business apps are just a big collection of workflows. A user logs in - something happens. A user submits a web form - something else happens.

The Kinetic workflow builder leverages standard ERM building blocks to let you create flexible, automated business processes, including:

• Email capabilities: For sending notifications, reminders, and other communications.
• Tasking: For creating and assigning tasks, such as working on help tickets or reviewing documents.
• Robots: For scheduling workflows to initiate at scheduled times. This functionality makes it easy to stay on top of tasks that should be completed on a regular basis, such as requiring user password updates or performing routine data synchronization. Learn more about Robots here.
• Approvals: For sending automatic approval requests to specific individuals based on the type of the request and the person submitting it; for example, a user’s request to purchase new software might require approval from their manager.
• Alerting: For sending messages to specific individuals based on specified conditions, such as notifying a manager when a new hire is scheduled for onboarding.
• Scheduling: For assigning events or other blocks of time against a resource to prevent double-booking, such as conference rooms.
• Calendars: For connecting events, dates, and times that aren’t connected to specific resources, such as establishing lunch hours or office closures for holidays.
• Surveys: For sending individuals or groups contextually relevant questions based on specific events, such as closing a support ticket. For example, a user whose work order was recently completed might receive a survey requesting feedback on the speed of completion, whether all parts of the work order have been completed, and so on.

Each step in a workflow is given a set of inputs that perform an action and return a predefined set of outputs, which you can then leverage to make business decisions. As processes evolve, you can easily improve them over time using our low-code drag-and-drop designer.

Kinetic Workflows can perform complex tasks that require things like looping, recursion, data manipulation, and string interpolation. What’s more, our emphasis on using common frameworks means you can easily extend a workflow’s functionality using your preferred scripting language.

Integrations

Integrations are critical to modernization efforts in large organizations. Upgrading traditional processes to digital equivalents requires a platform that is designed to connect with any underlying system of record, pushing and pulling data based on the needs of the user. No app exists on an island: they need to work with the larger ecosystem, especially when you start getting major adoption.

All integration plugins are built to a standard specification which defines a set of inputs, outputs and connection information. These plugins are built using code so that they can be battle tested and distributed throughout the Platform confidently.

Plugin code can be customized to import libraries and SDKs, making them able to work with just about any system. Plugins can be built to use any protocol imaginable, including REST, SOAP, SNMP, RPC, and more. You can also call directly to databases with proprietary languages using imported Java libraries. Oh, and if that's not enough, you can call a command line to reach into other systems too.

Once built, integrations get packaged up, tested, and imported into the Platform. After connection information is configured, integrations can be used in a low-code fashion by non-developers in Kinetic's Form and Workflow designers.

What About Reporting?

The way we store data in Cassandra is designed to drive performance when creating and modifying individual records. This keeps response times quick for both builders and end users, but presents a challenge when it comes to making that information available for reports. We tackled that challenge by adding webhook capabilities that replicate transactional data to a SQL database that is optimized for reporting. The Reporting Overview and corresponding documentation in the Documentation Library go into more detail on this subject.