Collaboration

Since Soltex is specifically targeted at large scale distributed applications that involve data submitted and edited by hundreds of persons and organisations, we pay special attention to seamless collaboration between data providers and managers. In some Soltex-based solutions collaboration is provided as a scheduled data submission and analysis workflow with managers and data providers communicating by e-mail, telephone or fax; while other applications offer online data sharing where every particular dataset can be opened, edited and analysed by many users simultaneously.

Scheduled Workflow

Scheduled workflow is the conventional collaboration model. It is governed by data collection, validation and analysis workflow that defines notifications, reminders and confirmations sent by data managers to data providers or other users in response to specified conditions (start of data collection, data submission delay, failed validation check etc.). Some of these notifications can be automatically generated by Soltex along customer’s guidelines, while others, like phone calls, are performed by managers.

We have tried and tested this workflow-based collaboration scheme in numerous projects with splendid results: it dramatically improves data collection and management efficiency, provider participation and takeover as well as overall data quality.

Online Collaboration

Along with workflow schedules and timelines Soltex can be configured to support online collaboration model offered by many web-services. Online collaboration means that users can simultaneously access datasets (tables, reports, filters) stored in a system and work on them as a team coordinated by instant messaging or other means. Every team member, provided he has sufficient access rights, can enter or edit data in any cell, column or row, while other ones can at the same time work on other cells, columns or rows.
While people collaborate online, Soltex will constantly save and update data they are working on to ensure that every bit is stored.

Online collaboration model is a more hands-on approach to shared data management with updates and their effect instantly visible to the whole team. Our Bitcut service is a good example of online collaboration.