Introduction

This article describes Meridix Studio from a conceptual and technical view and describes how the system handles the target platforms (current and future) and how it can be integrated into existing environments and portals.

Meridix Studio overview

Meridix Studio is a report generator and by itself Meridix Studio does not have any native support for any specific type of reports or target platforms. Each supported platform is built up as a custom module that is loaded into the Meridix Studio main application. Each of these modules can have any number of reports with different combinations of charts and columns defined.

The system consists of a web based user interface which is accessed by the user through their browsers and no additional plug-ins is required (e.g. Flash or Silverlight). The system is available both as a cloud service (through PAAS on Microsoft Windows Azure) or as an on-site installation where users access the system through their local area network. Read more about Meridix as a cloud service here.

The user interface is designed to give users a consistent way of creating reports for each of the platforms that the system has loaded, this basically means that once a user has learned to use one type of module in the system they can use all the other supported modules in the same way.
But since not all platforms delivers the same source data and some platforms have a more granular information level than others, each module is created specifically for that target platform data to be able to give as relevant information as possible. So even though the user interface remains consistent the reports and their content is built specifically for each platform to be able to give users as good information as possible for their specific platforms.

Another feature is that the system allows a mixed set of modules in the same installation. This means that if a customer has multiple data sources that they want to create report for, perhaps a PBX and an external call center system, one single Meridix installation can collect data from both these sources and give the end users an integrated and consistent way of handling their reporting even though the source information comes from multiple platforms.

The system is also built around the principle that different users has different needs and knowledge and users are therefor divided into separate roles where a user with only basic reporting needs can use a simpler and stripped down version of the user interface and if needed later upgrade/change to the advanced mode where the full feature set of the system is available, this makes the system easy to get started with and users do not have to be experts from day one to get good value from the reports.

And in addition to the on demand reporting capabilities the system has a report distribution system that lets users create and schedule reports that are then executed and sent automatically by the system based on user defined schedules. This makes it easy to spread the information throughout the organization without forcing each receiver to learn a new system. The reports are sent in well known formats such as Excel and lets the users work in a familiar environment with the reports.

Another important feature of the system is the built-in (integrated) documentation. End users should always be able to interpret and understand the reports without needing to have external documentation available. This is accomplished by integrating what we refer to as column/report descriptions into the reports and the information is always available directly within the system (through tool-tips, pop-ups etc). This is also the case in when a report is exported out of the system to for example Excel since the importance of understanding the report values does not go away just because the report leaves the Meridix Studio user interface. The main concept can be summarized by saying: A user should always know exactly what he or she is looking at and be able to understand and make the most of the information at hand.

Multi tenant support (Multi customer support)

Meridix Studio has support for multiple customers in a single system where each customer can get its own part of the system and work in isolation even though they reside in an larger system with multiple customers. This allows companies to have one single Meridix Studio installation where all their customers reside. This is used by for example carriers (operators) that have a platform that can contain thousands of customers, in these cases a multi customer Meridix installation i set up. (A Meridix installation has support to scale both up and out to allow very large numbers of customers, read more about Meridix scaling possibilities here)

Support for new or updated platforms

As mentioned in the previous section Meridix Studios available reports is built up by creating modules for the platforms that we want to support. To add support for reports targeting a new platform Meridix needs to create a new module were the platforms source data is handled and interpreted. Once this is done the newly created module can be hooked into the Meridix engine and all the functionality such as the many report grouping options, subscription reports and Excel exports etc will be handled by the Meridix Studio main system. Therefor we can easily add support for new releases of existing platforms and add support for new or future platforms without needing to "reinvent the wheel" each time.
This makes Meridix Studio an ideal solution for companies that sells or works with multiple platforms since once they have learned to use Meridix Studio all the knowledge can be applied even if the target platform changes.

Branding and theming

Meridix Studio has a very extensive branding support, where the user interface can be changed per installation through our theme package model. This allows a customer to easily modify their installations user interface so that it matches their company profile. Logos, colors, fonts, icons and export appearance and much more can be customized without requiring custom binary builds of the system. This is ideal when the report system should be integrated in a portal or be sold as part of a suite of other products. Read more about or branding and theming support here.

Language support

Meridix has support for multiple languages (English and Swedish, and at the time of writing Danish translations is being created) and can easily be translated to additional languages if required (more information about translations). Our current plan is to support all the Nordic languages in the near future.
But to a key feature to make a system easily integrable into other platforms or suites/portals etc. is that the vocabulary used in Meridix Studio can be modified on a per site basis. Each supported language is integrated into the compiled binary code to achieve the best possible performance, but the system has support for customer specific overrides. I.e. if a customer want to change the used vocabulary for a feature/section/page to match the vocabulary used in other products that they sell or work with or just want to use another definition for something than the default all the resources used in Meridix Studio can be overridden at runtime through Meridix Studios support for translation-override-packages and therefore no changes to the original translation files is required (which would require a new compiled version of the system to be deployed when a change has been made).
And by combining this override feature with a custom theme (see previous section) a customer can customize almost every aspect of the interface for the end users.

Integration with other systems

Meridix can be used as a stand alone product with no integration except for the report source data import, but it can also be connected and integrated with other systems to allow seamless logins from an existing portals or let another system use the report engine through the Meridix web/http based API.

Catalog synchronization

For larger customer there are usually thousands or even tens of thousands of numbers/users/extension etc. that should be targeted when creating reports. If the user where forced to manually enter this information into Meridix it would be a daunting and error prone task that probably would get out of sync quite fast since organizations changes, new users/numbers is added and removed on a daily basis. To enable Meridix to work even for large organizations the system has full support for synchronization against external catalogs, this is the recommended way of handling the catalog in Meridix i.e. you define a synchronization against a master catalog that Meridix mirrors, then there are zero administration of keeping Meridix up to date with information/catalogs in other systems.

SSO - Single Sign On and existing portal integration support

Meridix Studio can easily be integrated into an existing portal and the login can be transparent to the end users through the single sign on support. And with the branding and theming support the Meridix user interface can be restyled in a way so that users do not know that they left the portal. Example: if a customer/reseller has an existing customer portal an SSO can be setup so that existing portal users can be logged in into a Meridix Studio installation branded in the same way as the portal so that the end users wont know they left the portal at all, the login is handled automatically and Meridix can be opened in a iframe or as a new window depending on the portal design. Read more about our SSO support here.

HTTP API - Custom user requirements

No system can probably handle every single users requirements out of the box, there will always be end users with very specific requirements therefor Meridix Studio has an very extensive HTTP based API that allow end users and customers to integrate Meridix into other products or systems through its API (Application Programming Interface). Users can then create reports, edit users, handle scheduled reports through their program language of choice. Read more about our API support here.