ITEMS - Integrated Traveling Exhibit Management System
Overview
In the North America and Europe, numerous cultural organizations create exhibits that travel around the world. Any moment in a year, hundreds of exhibits are traveling or are on display, bringing histories, memories, and knowledge to communities, schools, and the public. However, in the past no dedicated commercial software products were available to support traveling exhibits management and businesses basically depended on home-grown systems in combination of manual work. This plight situation has ended with the advent of ITEMS, the first and only commercial product built with modern software technologies and targeting the small industry of traveling exhibits.
ITEMS, standing for Integrated Traveling Exhibits Management Systems, covers various business areas related to traveling exhibits and all system modules work synergistically to maximally help the customer to achieve their business goals with ease. ITEMS is coded with the best software practices and cutting-edge JEE technologies and has all hallmarks of a strong enterprise system. It has a rich set of functionalities and handiness, convenience, and effectiveness are the theme across all the application modules. Because of being built on deep understanding of the business of traveling exhibits and the use of latest software technologies, as a dedicated system, ITEMS has great flexibility for easy expansion, modification, or customization, offering a great many possibilities to meet customer needs and for product growth and enhancement in the future.
Enterprise Application
ITEMS supports business transaction to make sure that the system data integrity will not be violated. ITEMS provides various mechanism to ensure that the system works with maximum data protection. ITEMS supports simultaneous users working in the system and gracefully handles conflicting edits made by concurrent users. ITEMS supports clustering to maximize business continuity with minimal system downtime. It supports clustering, not because it merely claims or it simply uses J2EE technologies, but because a great effort has been made to make sure each feature will work in case of clustering. ITEMS supports multiple databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, etc.
Rich Features
Here is a glimpse of what ITEMS can do:
- Exhibitors: managing exhibitors records and related addresses, contacts, profiles, galleries, close-out surveys, and invoices.
- Exhibits and scheduling: managing exhibits as well as related contracts, project team, venues, markets, publications, and events.
- Registration, managing objects, lenders, items, crates, thematic sections, loans, shipments, etc.
- Accounting, managing payment plans, invoices, refunds, payment methods.
- Publication: managing publications and associated printings, orders, packing slips, returns, and refunds.
- Development : managing sponsors and preferred markets.
- Public relations: managing events, contacts, and guests.
In addition, ITEMS uses role-based security to flexibly protect the system and content. It offers various features such as hot links, record notes, document attachment, reminder/alert, dashboard, intra-system messaging, and system announcement. It is truly an intuitive, handy, effective, and powerful application!
Strong Security
Data and application security is of paramount importance in web applications. Various security mechanisms have been built into ITEMS. It is very likely that you have never seen so much consideration and effort on application security in other web-based software products.
- A user can only see menu items applicable to his role
- All web urls are protected based on user roles
- Each data record or form has two views: read-only view and edit view for proper users with edit rights
- Each data record has two fields for tracking who did the last change at what time
- Show certain pieces of data on a form only to proper user roles
- Client browsers automatically close after a certain period of inactivity
Depth of Engineering
In fact, we at INFORMATED are users of various software products too and we surely understand the significance of a tool being effective and handy. We have gone great lengths to ensure that the system is handy, convenient, and effective to our customers. The following shows a glimpse of what has been done to make it the best available system with regard to the traveling exhibit business.
- Waterfall changes to existing venues if they are conflicting with a new venue
- A large number of data fields are searchable
- For each search function, multiple sorting is available and a user has the total control of the order of data fields as well as which data fields to display
- For data listing, export formats include XML, CVS, and Excel
- For data listing, each column is sortable by end users
- Users can attach any number of notes or reminders/alerts to all important concepts such as exhibits, venues, exhibitors, invoices, etc.
- A system admin can make system-wide announcements
- Client-side data validation is implemented for all forms to ensure data quality
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