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TOOLIP Features

System & Performance

System management and Caching

The performance of each TOOLIP installation is heavily benefited by caching of information that is reused. This cache is also manageable by administrators allowing both automated and manual re-caching. A full suite of management actions give the higher-tier technical administrator full access to system vitals and statistics, performance indicators and schedulers as well as to more complex administrative and content management actions (scheduled tasks, inter-portal cloning of information, mass updates, etc.) that should not be performed by basic level content managers.

Protection against malicious acts and attacks

Information security is not to be taken lightly. TOOLIP implements all Top 10 web application security recommendations from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). TOOLIP powered websites and data are, therefore, protected from malicious acts and attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting and SQL Injection.

Session Management

The system maintains a session for each user who logs in. This session can be kept alive in the system for a pre-defined amount of time. It can also be traced and managed by administrators providing useful support in conjunction with the powerful audit trail engine.

User Interface / Usability

Advanced File Management System

TOOLIP offers an internal repository for file uploads. The mechanism is customizable to impose restrictions to size and file extensions.

CK Editor (WYSIWYG rich text editing)

This commonly used editor sets the foundation for advanced rich text content editing. CKEditor is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which means that the text being edited on it looks as similar as possible to the results users have when publishing it. It brings common editing features found on desktop editing applications like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice to the web. 

Document Management System (DMS)

File Management is extended by this feature to offer light DMS functionality. Files can be encapsulated in richer entities that allow for further defining metadata and a library back-office. The encapsulating entities can also be multilingual and automatically updated with newer versions of the documents (versioning).

Integrated simple and advanced full-text search

Based on the Apache Lucene open source text searching library, TOOLIP has a deeply integrated text searching mechanism that can be fully parameterised and customised. This powerful library provides the base for an extensible engine which includes ranking of search results ("best" results first), proximity searching (measuring the distance between matching terms within a document), fuzzy searching (as opposed to exact word matching), search suggestions ("Did you mean...?") etc.

Integration with external information publishing subsystems 
(e.g. meteorological or stocks information)

The architecture can easily integrate input of information from external sources by either directly caching/presenting them or transforming and integrating them to TOOLIP entities and structures. In addition, information can be exchanged in various B2B scenarios.

Internal messaging system

Besides the standard email notification system which can be customised to notify users on specific events/actions, TOOLIP also has an integral messaging system that allows logged in users to contact each other, especially in collaborative environments that have users remotely working with the system. This messaging system allows for a history of discussions to be kept, as well as an integration with the content management allowing users to directly inform each other on specific actions needed on specific portal pages.

Members Area & Members Subscription Management

TOOLIP Portals can allow for a multi-level visitor access. Visitors may be offered membership subscription via a customisable workflow that can involve CAPTCHA identification and email validations. Subscriptions can be managed by an appropriate back office which can also integrate with online payment mechanisms. Like TOOLIP Users (e.g. content managers and administrators), Members (visitors) may have different roles that define their level of access and/or contribution to the portal.

Multi-purpose Contact Us web forms

HTML forms can be customised in order to collect information from visitors and either store information in a back end system for central administration and processing or send them by email to assigned managers. These forms can refer to different departments or business units with multiple responsible users as recipients of user messages.

Online Payments and Orders Management

TOOLIP sites can be integrated online with banks to enable purchases of products or paid subsriptions to services. The online security of the transaction is guaranteed by our InfoSec standards. In TOOLIP you can also view and manage all orders and payments made through your portal.

Page versioning and full action history & logging

Build-in into the TOOLIP core system is a complex logger that keeps track of all  user actions. This log is provided to system users as a history of activity, with features that allow rolling back to a previous version of a page which may be particularly useful for undoing user and content errors. Information is kept on various levels and entities, allowing for a cross-matrix of activity information.

Remote Administration

As a web-based environment TOOLIP allows remote usage of the system (or selected areas of it). Users do not need to install anything as everything can be handled by any of the widely used web browsers.

Users Management

Users may be assigned different roles allowing for detailed breakdown of responsibilities, allowed actions, and assigned areas of the web site. Functionality assigned to user roles and types, and workflow procedures are further enhancements with the addition of back end modules build specifically for this purpose. Management of these roles and responsibilities fall upon administration users who may create, delete or re-assign rights to the system's users.

Video Integration

TOOLIP can directly link and recognise various common platforms for video uploads (such as YouTube and Google Video). This feature minimizes the costs and efforts for clients needing an easy and afforable solution for video hosting and streaming rather than delving into custom in-house solutions.

Web Services (SOA) integration

Inter-exchange of information can be extended to more complex methods and more importantly Web Services. This feature can be used for data exchange but can also provide for an integration or exporting of functionality from an external system (e.g. Integration of an ERP system).

E-Learning

Course Management system

This feature extends TOOLIP to incorporate functionality form E-Learning suites. Users can be broken down to appropriate Roles (teaching or participating roles for example), Courses can be published, subscribed to and managed by this feature. Further functionality can be extended again by the integration with other TOOLIP features (e.g. with the Document Management System for uploading coursework or the Students Management System).

Students Management system

Toolip User Management can also be extended by this feature to provide functionality more inherent with E-Learning environment. User information can extend to incorporate grading, grouping of users (students by class or course), etc.

Social Exposure

"My Friends / Connections" social networking system (like Facebook, Twitter or Linked In)

A third party tool or custom single-feature solutions can both be used for allowing the sharing of information over all currently used social networks or online sharing communicities. Additionally an internal feature allows the extension of the User model to allow sharing and bookmarking of information between the system's users.

Advanced Blogging system

Features now commonly used in Blogging platforms can also be provided by TOOLIP disabling the need for separate systems for content management and blog management. Like Forums moderation and user management can be provided according to need.

Advanced Reporting system

Back office modules can be extended to allow collection and filtering of information to produce meaningful and concise reports whose look can be customised according to needs. These reports can be printer friendly and can also be exported in various commonly used formats (Comma-separated file, spreadsheet, document etc).

Article Management System

A powerfull back office can enhance the front end content management procedure directly towards news management, publishing and syndication. Metadata (Categories, Taxonomies, Tags etc) can further define and categorise articles into different types and contextual groups.

Customisable Newsletter System

Newsletters subscriptions can be gathered and managed by the system. User lists can then be extracted to be used by external mass mailing tools. Content can be drawn from the site or specific templates can be customised for the actual newsletter allowing both standard text or rich HTML results.

Events Management System

Events can be described according to need from simple content page containers up to complex structures like small mini-sites unto themselves. In combination with other features, the Events Management System can provide subscription functionality, timetable and availability information, booking of time-zones and specific sessions, and relevant files and documents for each specific event.

Forums

TOOLIP Pages can be customised to conform with accepted standards for Forum users around the internet. Discussion can be modeled into forums, threads and user posts or similar structures; moderation can be enabled or disabled and statistics can be presented on posts. Usages of the forums can be modified by the User management module in case specific rules need apply on who can access and/or post.

GEO tagging mechanism (exploiting Google maps)

TOOLIP pages can integrate with GOOGLE Maps bring in location based information, geographical position and similar features used online. The full features made available by the GOOGLE Maps suite is compatible with the TOOLIP architecture.

Google sitemap generation and OpenSearch functionality  and other commonly used web practices

We are constantly upgrading our practices to be up to date with the internet community trends. XML sitemaps are generated automatically and submitted to the most popular search engines to allow for the correct spider-crawling of client's content and as a result improved performance in the SERPs (Search Engine Results page).

Mass mailing tool

Email lists can be managed and collated via search criteria into mailing lists that can be used for mass mailing features.

Multilingual support

TOOLIP is build from the ground up with multilingual support in mind. The flexible architecture does not enforce uniform content and structure in multilingual websites, allowing different locales to be built at a different pace. At the same time a number of TOOLIP tools speed up the process of creating different language versions of the website.

Multimedia Galleries & Multimedia Management  (Protected file uploads and central file repository)

File management receives special treatment when it comes to audio, video and images. Files can be uploaded to the system server in a protected area. Galleries can be built and managed in a back office environment and then linked to appropriate content in the front end.

Multiple Site Skins (customisation)

The CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that defines the look of the portal's template does not have to be restricted to a single solution that attempts to cover all graphical and design aspects. Multiple CSS skins can be generated to ensure that multiple wesbite styles can be applied to different sites or sections within the portal, or the whole look and skin of the portal can be customised based on visitors' preferences.

News Publishing Workflows

Workflows can be enabled and customised to allow for complex content generation, editing, proof reading and scheduling of news articles by a custom-built set of user roles (e.g. editor, publisher, etc). Actions allow the interaction between users and the modification of article states (implementing the workflow rules), while user's landing screens can be customised per role to ease available responsibilities.

Online Surveys and Poll Management system

TOOLIP can provide either a loose integration with 3rd party tools or a customised dynamic module integrated in the portal. In the latter case, preset forms or user manageable questions can be provided. A detailed reporting back end can provide results and statistics as well as expose part of the survey results to the public in rich format.

Rating mechanism by users

Any site created with TOOLIP support user comments and ratings for specific content types like news, multimedia or events. The website administrator can easily turn comments and ratings on and off and can as easily manage user comments, moderate and publish them. TOOLIP offers a comprehensive notification system so that you can be notified about all user generated content on your portal.

Real-time Chat

Portals may be enhanced with a customisable real-time chatting engine that provides all the standard features available in similar environments (moderation, user login, access rights, multiple rooms/lobbies etc).

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds allow for the delivery of fast changing content to the user rather than forcing the user to repeatedly visit the content-rich website to check for updates. TOOLIP has a built-in engine for RSS feeds that generates automatically RSS feeds for any content-generating page. Feeds that can be subscribed to, may be for the overall portal, for a specific page's content updates or even for custom searches a visitor performs(e.g. by text searching for a term or by tags or keywords should this functionality be enabled).

Tags system

Tags are inherent to most content-heavy publication portals allowing for a fairly recognised form of grouping and searching within information. The feature is further enhanced by a management back office allowing tag managers to monitor the usage of tags and manage them (create, edit, delete, merge). Tag clouds can also be used for presentation of popular tag themes or richer visual categorisation of content.

User Commenting

Content within a TOOLIP system can be marked as available for visitor commenting. In conjunction with the Members Subscription model users can freely post or may be asked to log in first. Additionally moderation can occur before or after a user post becomes public. A flexible back office as well as a notification system allows for the management and moderation of comments.