Athento can adapt to any information structure that has an organization. To do so, it uses some key elements: teams, spaces, forms, and fields. Below, Athento’s data model is explained, how each element works, and how they relate to each other.
Teams
A team in Athento is a grouping that can represent a company, an area, a department, a business process, etc. Teams allow information, users, and associated configurations to be separated and managed independently. Each team can have its own spaces, users, and business rules.
Multi-tenancy: Teams make it possible to implement multi-tenancy scenarios, that is, to separate the data and processes of different entities within the same Athento instance. For example, different companies within a corporate group, offices in different countries, or independent processes such as sales management and billing
Spaces
Within each team, spaces are logical containers that group documents, forms, and related configurations. Spaces can represent projects, functional areas, document types, or any other classification relevant to the organization.
Spaces can have default forms, restrictions on which forms can be used, and other rules to control the organization and flow of documents.
Forms
Forms (or document types) are templates that define the metadata or fields that describe each type of document. They allow capturing structured information and providing context for documents. In addition to fields, forms allow powerful configurations, some of which are described below.
- Life cycles: These are the states that a document of a form or type can go through. A form can have a main life cycle and other parallel life cycles.
- Global forms: Forms can be configured as global to be used in spaces of different teams, facilitating the reuse and standardization of information across the organization.
- Folderish forms: Athento allows forms to be displayed as folders, ideal for managing case files or sets of related documents.
- Public forms: It is possible to publish forms so that external users can upload documents or fill in information without authenticating on the platform, which facilitates collaboration with customers or suppliers.
Fields
Fields allow storing data associated with a document. Athento supports a wide variety of data types, and users can create fields from the product interface and in real time.
Fields are key in Athento, because they enable document retrieval regardless of their physical location, as well as the exploitation of data from documents stored in Athento.
The document
The document is the “basic documentary unit”. Although in Athento they are called documents, they are used to store:
- Records: only field values.
- Binary files: PDFs, Word documents, Videos, Photographs, Excel files, or any format.
- Fields and binary files: metadata and a main binary.
- Folders or case files: a document in Athento can represent a case file or folder, have fields, and in turn contain other documents.
Relationships between documents
Relationships or hyperlinks between documents can be defined in Athento. Relationships can be hierarchical, for example, one element can contain another (parent-to-child relationship), be contained in another (child-to-parent relationship), or be horizontal relationships not linked to any hierarchy.
Hierarchy and relationship between Athento’s basic elements
A document will always have a form assigned and will be located within a space. The space, in turn, belongs to a team.
Hierarchy: The basic structure is Team > Space > Form > Document. This hierarchy enables a clear and scalable organization of information.
Navigation: Athento supports hierarchical navigation of spaces and folders, subfolders, and the documents they contain. Athento recommends that organizations design their organizational structure based on fields or metadata, rather than folders, since fields will give them the possibility to group documents dynamically by different criteria, as well as find information faster.