Getting Started

Welcome to ActiveManage

ActiveManage is a development platform for building business applications without writing custom code. Instead of starting from a blank database and a stack of frameworks, you start from a set of building blocks — datastores, forms, browse views, workflows, dashboards, integrations — and assemble them into the solution your business needs.

The platform is genuinely production-grade — many organisations run their primary operational systems on it — and at the same time accessible enough that non-developer admins can extend and configure it. That balance comes from a few core design choices: every piece of business data lives in a datastore that auto-generates its own forms and lists, every action is permission-controlled, and every external system integration is configurable rather than code-driven.

What you can build with it

The breadth is wide. To give a few concrete examples:

• Internal request and approval workflows — purchase requests, leave applications, expense claims, change requests, IT tickets, building access requests, capital expenditure approvals.
• Customer-facing self-service portals — order tracking, account management, document libraries, knowledge bases, support ticket submission.
• eCommerce storefronts with carts, vendor applications, recurring subscriptions, discount codes, multiple payment methods.
• CRM and ticketing systems — customer records linked to contacts, interactions, and sales pipeline; support ticket queues with SLA tracking.
• Booking and scheduling apps — appointments, room reservations, classes, multi-resource bookings.
• Data-capture forms with conditional logic, validation, and email/SMS notifications.
• Multi-tenant SaaS products where each customer gets their own isolated environment.
• Operational dashboards with charts, lists, and custom widgets pulled from your live data.

Two sides of every ActiveManage system

Every running ActiveManage instance has two distinct user surfaces, each with its own conventions and audience:

The Admin Panel

Where you (the builder) configure datastores, forms, workflows, permissions, integrations, and everything else. Reached at the /am.admin/ path. Designed for ongoing configuration and operational tasks.

The Application

What your end users see — built from pages, forms, dashboards, and any custom HTML/JS/PHP you wire in. Reached at whatever URLs you configure (often the root path of your site). Designed for the specific job your application does.

Both share the same underlying datastores, user accounts, security groups, and permission rules. They differ only in what they expose to whom — the Admin Panel surfaces every configurable feature; the Application surfaces only what end users need.

How these docs are organised

Each section in the sidebar covers one area of the platform. Articles inside a section start with overviews and move toward specifics:

• Start with Getting Started if you're brand new — it covers the core concepts and walks through your first datastore.
• Then read Datastores & Data Management — almost everything else builds on this.
• From there, follow whichever subject is relevant for your application — Forms, User Management, eCommerce, etc.

Tip: If you ever can't find what you're looking for, use the search box in the docs header. It searches across every article title and body. The platform itself also has a Site Searching feature you can configure for your application's own content.

Key Concepts

A handful of terms turn up everywhere in ActiveManage. Learn these and the rest of the platform is much easier to navigate — you'll know what's being referenced and how the pieces fit together. This article is a concept-first introduction; for an alphabetical reference, see the Glossary.

Datastore

A datastore is ActiveManage's name for a database table. Every record your application stores lives in a datastore. You can create as many as you need, each with its own field structure, permissions, and behaviour.

Where standard database tables are bare — rows and columns and nothing else — ActiveManage datastores come with auto-generated forms, browse views, audit logs, soft-delete semantics, tenant scoping, and API exposure baked in. You define the table once and get all that for free.

Fields and Field Types

A datastore has fields (columns). Each field has a type that controls how it's rendered on forms, how it's validated, and how it's stored — Text Box, Number, Date, Dropdown, File Upload, Conditional Form, and around 50 others.

Field types determine what configuration options are available when you add a field to a table. A Number field reveals Min Value, Max Value, Allow Decimals, and Units. A Dropdown Box (Searchable) (DB) reveals Data Source, Option Sorting, Display Format, Parent ID Field, and many more. Picking the right field type is one of the most important decisions when building a datastore.

Browse View

A browse view is how datastore rows are listed for end users. You control which columns appear, what filters and search options are available, and which row-level action buttons ("Edit", "View", custom actions) are exposed.

Different roles can have different browse views of the same datastore. Sales sees one set of columns and actions on the customers table; Customer Service sees a different set on the same table. One backing datastore, many tailored views.

User Input View (UIV)

A UIV is a multi-stage submission form. The user fills it in ("stage 1"), then the resulting record moves through one or more approval stages, each with its own assignee, visible fields, allowed actions, timeouts, and email notifications.

UIVs are how you build approval-style workflows in ActiveManage — purchase requests, leave applications, support tickets, change-approval, customer onboarding. They handle email sending, audit trails, and reminders without you writing any code.

Permissions and Security Groups

Every datastore, field, and row can be permission-controlled. Permissions are granted to security groups, not to individual users. Users are added to groups individually or automatically via registration rules.

Groups can be composed (a user can be in multiple groups), and their effective permissions are the union of every group they belong to. There's no "deny" mechanism — permissions are grant-only.

Tenant

If multi-tenancy is enabled, each customer of your platform is a tenant. Tenants have isolated data — either by tenantid column on shared tables (cheap, simple) or by separate physical databases per tenant (more isolation, more management).

Multi-tenancy is opt-in — many ActiveManage installs run single-tenant and never use the feature. For SaaS products serving multiple customer organisations, it's essential.

Architect Panel

The Architect Panel (reached from the admin panel sidebar) is the master configuration hub. Every feature you can build with ActiveManage is reachable from here, organised by category — Security, Forms, Data, Layout, Activity, Configuration, and others. If you're configuring anything, you'll almost always start here.

Mini-form

Mini-forms are platform-shipped fragments of conditional form logic that turn up wherever certain options need follow-on fields. For example, when configuring a Dropdown's Option Sorting, picking "By Field" reveals a Sort Field Name input — that reveal is driven by a mini-form. You don't typically configure mini-forms yourself; they're the building blocks behind the platform's own UIs.

Task Engine

The Task Engine runs scheduled jobs — anything that should happen automatically on a cadence rather than in response to a user action. Maintenance jobs, recurring imports, billing runs, cleanup, scheduled reports. Defined via the Tasks admin; each task has a schedule and a handler.

Your First Datastore

The fastest way to understand ActiveManage is to create your first datastore and add a few fields to it. This article walks through the end-to-end flow in about five minutes — by the end you'll have a working table, a form to add rows to it, and a list view to see what's been added.

1. Open the Datastores admin

From the Admin Panel home, open the Architect Panel and click Datastores under the Data section. You'll see every existing datastore listed — both the platform-shipped ones (with a leading dot) and any application-specific ones already created.

Click the green New Datastore button in the top-right corner.

2. Name your datastore

Pick a real example to work with. We'll build a Customers datastore. Fill in:

• Datastore Name: customers
• Friendly Name: Customers
• Name of Rows: Customer (singular)

Leave the advanced settings at their defaults for now. Save.

3. Add fields

You're now on the field-management screen. Click New Datastore Field. The first field for our Customers table will be Company Name:

• Row Name: companyname
• Friendly Name: Company Name
• Field Type: Text Box
• Required: on
• Min Length: 2
• Max Length: 100

Save the field. Repeat for a few more:

• contactemail — Friendly Name "Contact Email", Field Type Text Box, Validation "Email format", Required on.
• phonenumber — Friendly Name "Phone Number", Field Type Phone Number.
• createdate — Friendly Name "Created Date", Field Type Date, Default Value {{today}}.
• active — Friendly Name "Active", Field Type Toggle Switch, Default Value 1.

You now have a datastore with five fields. The auto-generated form for adding new customers includes all of them, with the right input types and validation already applied.

4. Add a row

Back on the datastore list (Architect Panel → Datastores), find your new customers datastore and click View Data. The data table opens — empty for now. Click the green New Customer button (notice the button label reflects the Name of Rows setting you picked).

Fill in:

• Company Name: "Acme Corp"
• Contact Email: "contact@acme.example.com"
• Phone Number: "+44 20 7946 0123"
• Created Date: today's date (pre-filled by the default value)
• Active: on

Save. The customer appears in the list.

5. Where to go next

You've just built the simplest possible ActiveManage application — a single datastore with manual data entry. From here, the platform's features open up:

• Configure permissions so only the right people can see and edit the data. See the Security & Access Control section.
• Create a User Input View if you want a public-facing form that submits into this datastore with an approval workflow on top. See the Forms section.
• Build a Browse View if you want a tailored listing for end users — different columns, different filters than the admin default.
• Add the customers list to a Page Builder page for end-user access.
• Set up the API if external systems need to read/write customers programmatically.

Tip: Don't worry about getting the datastore perfect on the first try. Fields can be added, edited, and reordered later. The most common pattern is to start with the obvious fields and add more as you discover what your application actually needs.

Logging in to the Admin Panel

The Admin Panel is reached at the /am.admin/ path of your ActiveManage instance. It's where every configuration task happens — managing datastores, building forms, granting permissions, monitoring logs, configuring integrations.

How you log in depends on a few platform-wide settings, particularly the Login Page Mode and whether 2-factor authentication is enabled. This article covers what each user sees in different configurations.

How login works

Your instance is configured for one of two login modes, set globally in Site Settings:

standard mode

Shows the email and password fields together on one page. Most secure: an attacker who guesses a valid email gets no feedback because the form looks identical for known and unknown emails. The trade-off is a slightly slower UX — the user has to type both before seeing any response.

emailcheck mode

Asks for the email first. If it's registered, the password field appears; if not, a registration form. Best for user experience because it adapts to the visitor. The trade-off is that an attacker can enumerate valid emails by trying them one by one.

Two-Factor Authentication

If 2FA is enabled platform-wide (Site Settings → 2-factor Authentication), you'll be prompted for a code after the password step. The code arrives by SMS or comes from an authenticator app (TOTP), depending on how 2FA is set up on your specific account.

Without a valid second factor you can't enter the admin panel even with the correct password. For high-security environments, 2FA is forced for admin-level accounts — even if it's optional for ordinary users, admins typically have it required.

What you see after login

The admin panel home gives you three main entry points along the sidebar:

• Admin Home — the customisable dashboard for everyday work. Each admin can have their own arrangement of widgets (charts, lists, status indicators) pinned here.
• Architect Panel — the master configuration hub with links to every feature of the platform, organised by category.
• Status Panel — quick visibility on outstanding tickets, errors, and system status.

Below those, the sidebar continues with User Administration links (All Users, User Groups), Instance management (for multi-tenant installs), and any custom navigation items configured for your role.

Three real-world login scenarios

Scenario 1: New admin first login

An admin sets up your account, you receive a welcome email with a link to set your password. You click through, set the password, log in for the first time. You land on the empty Admin Home dashboard. You'll typically want to pin some widgets relevant to your role before becoming productive.

Scenario 2: Daily login with 2FA

You navigate to /am.admin/, enter email and password, then enter the TOTP code from your authenticator app. If everything checks out you land on Admin Home with your pinned widgets pre-loaded.

Scenario 3: Forgotten password

You click the "Forgot password?" link on the login form, enter your email, click submit. A reset email arrives within a minute or two. You click the link, set a new password, and log in normally.

If you can't log in

The three most common reasons for a failed login:

• Wrong URL. Should be https://your-domain/am.admin/, not just /admin/ or the root domain. Bookmark the correct URL.
• Wrong password. Try a password reset via the link on the login page. If reset emails are disabled, contact an existing admin who can reset it from your user profile.
• Account or IP banned. If too many failed attempts triggered an automatic ban, an existing admin needs to clear it from the Architect Panel (Blocked User Accounts or Blocked IP Addresses).

The Architect Panel

The Architect Panel is the single screen from which every feature of ActiveManage is reachable. If you're configuring anything — a datastore, a permission, a notification template, a deployment, an integration — you'll almost always start here.

It's deliberately information-dense: every feature is one click away, organised by category, with hover descriptions on each icon and a global search box at the top. Spending time learning the layout pays off because you'll come back to it constantly.

How it's organised

Features are grouped into categories. The exact set depends on what's enabled on your instance — some categories are conditional on Site Settings (e.g. Subscriptions only appears when the subscription engine is enabled). The typical category set:

• Security — Permissions, Authentication Methods, Security Settings, Blocked User Accounts, Blocked IP Addresses.
• Forms — Conditional Forms, Dynamic Add Fields, Custom Fields, Custom Forms, Line Item Builders, User Input Views.
• Integration & Connections — Database Hosts, E-mail Accounts, API Server, Table Sync, Deployments, E-mail Inboxes, E-mail Relay Clients, API Clients, Azure AD Tenants.
• Data — Datastores, File Stores, Data Extraction, File Import Routines.
• Layout & Pages — Admin Panel Builder, Booking Calendars, Data Layouts, Pages, E-mail Templates, Dependencies, IDE, Browse Views, Document Templates, Header, E-mail Designs.
• Activity — Activity Log, E-mail Log, Error Log, SMS Log.
• Configuration — Search Engine Optimisation, Custom User Preferences, Multitenancy, Custom User Information Fields, Instance Configuration Fields, Friendly URLs, Site Settings, Custom Tenant Information Fields.
• Styling — Logo.
• Subscriptions — Feature Sets, Features, Subscription Packages.
• Dashboards — Custom Dashboard Blocks, Dashboard Styles, Shared Dashboard Layout.
• Help & Support — Manage Articles.
• Commercial — Carts.
• Automation — Tasks, Task Log.
• Internationalisation — Languages.
• Searching — Site Searching.
• Background Messaging — Polling, Push Notifications.
• Communication — Manage Meetings, Manage Chat Engines.

The search box

At the top of the panel is a search input. Start typing and the icons filter instantly — both by name and by the hover description. This is the fastest way to find a feature when you know what it's called but not which category it's in.

Examples:

• Type "email" and you'll see e-mail accounts, e-mail templates, e-mail logs, e-mail inboxes, and so on.
• Type "user" and you'll see user-related features across Security, User Administration, and Configuration.
• Type "calendar" and you'll see Booking Calendars.

Notification badges

Some icons show a coloured badge with a count. These badges reflect outstanding work — pending requests, unread items, configuration warnings.

• Green badge with 0 — everything clear.
• Red badge with N — there's something waiting for you. Click in to see what.

The badge counts come from each feature's countSQL configuration. Custom features added by your platform admins can include their own badge logic.

Quick-access from the sidebar

The sidebar (left side of every admin page) has shortcuts to:

• Admin Home — your customisable dashboard.
• Architect Panel — this screen.
• Status Panel — system status overview.

Below those: User Administration links (All Users, User Groups, Manage Instances for multi-tenant) and any custom navigation items configured for your role.

Tip: When working on a specific area of the platform for a session, you can leave the Architect Panel open in one browser tab and jump between features. Clicking a feature usually opens it in the same tab — use cmd-click (Mac) or ctrl-click (Windows) to open in a new tab if you want to keep the panel itself open as a hub.