Delian Gems
Over many years of designing and building databases, Delian Systems have developed many facilities that are generic providing benefit to all types of businesses. These industry independent facilities are known as "Gems" and all new developments contain these useful "Gems" that are integrated at no additional cost.

User identification
Each user is given a username and password which they need to specify in order to "log in". This username may, alternatively, default to that already used to log into the network.

Authority levels
A default of 3 authority levels applied independently to 3 authority groups is available. One authority group links to the main data whilst another authority group has access to the system administration facilities. The “data” levels are, typically, “Read only”, “Input and amend” and “Input, amend and delete” whilst the “system” levels are, typically, “Restricted” (ie no access), “Low” and “High”. Each user is assigned a level to each of the groups. The application of these groups and levels can be customised for each new project and, if required, additional groups and levels may be introduced.

Menu management
The switchboard displays the current menu of options in up to 3 rows each of up to 6 options. The options that are displayed may vary from user to user depending upon their authority levels. A single option may call the function selected or, alternatively, may activate a lower level menu that will replace the current menu with another set of up to 6 x 3 options. An infinite hierarchy of menus may be made available in this manner.

Auditing
Audit records are created in response to a variety of activities undertaken by users:

• Logging in (including failed attempts to log in)
• Selecting menu options
• Updating data manually
• Initiating batch processes
• Logging out

There is also the facility to audit all changes to a single critical field, eg Status, so that a history of changes to that field recording the time, user and reason may be retrieved subsequently.

The analysis of system usage using the audit records is made available to the system administrator(s).

Colour management
Forms are designed to use the standard Windows colours as set up in the colour scheme for the PC. Individual users may however, choose to override these colours either for single selected forms or for all forms they use.

Unbound forms
Forms are that are used for data entry and amendment are not bound to the tables from which they have been read. The benefits of this are:

• A larger numbers of users can log in and work on the database concurrently due to the reduced locking overheads
• "Save" and "Cancel" buttons are activated independently from the individual field changes giving users the option to cancel at any time without having to perform any updating at all
• Saving provides a consistent trigger to audit user actions
• Saving can be withheld until the minimum data set within a form has been entered

Drilldown
There are usually many hierarchies of data within a database eg communications within contacts within companies within orders. Delian Systems recognises the reason that data is entered onto a database is to facilitate its retrieval at a later time. Careful attention is applied to simplifying both the ease and speed with which any data can be accessed easily using a sequence of drilldown facilities. This results in most items of data being accessed within a few simple clicks.