Platform Overview

ActiveManage is a configurable platform aimed at letting non-developers build serious business applications quickly, while staying flexible enough that developers can extend it with custom PHP, JS, or HTML when needed.

Workflow-heavy applications

The User Input Views feature alone — multi-stage forms with approvals, timeouts, reminders, and email notifications — covers a huge swathe of business processes: purchase requests, leave applications, change requests, expense claims, document approvals, onboarding checklists, RMAs.

CRM and customer-facing portals

With datastores plus security groups plus browse views, you can build out a customer record, link contacts, log interactions, and expose self-service pages to those same customers — all without writing application code.

eCommerce

The Carts feature gives you product catalogues, baskets, checkout, discount codes, multiple payment methods, and Stripe integration out of the box. Combined with subscription packages and feature sets you can run a recurring-revenue product without bolt-on commerce systems.

Booking and scheduling

Booking calendars give time-based bookings with confirmation emails, availability slots, and conflict prevention. Wire them into a UIV and you have a complete booking workflow.

Multi-tenant SaaS

If multi-tenancy is enabled, you can run multiple isolated tenants on a single ActiveManage install — either with shared databases and per-tenant row ownership, or with separate physical databases per tenant. Database sharding is supported if you grow large.

Integrations

The API layer exposes everything stored in ActiveManage as REST endpoints, with API client management and detailed logging. Table Sync keeps records aligned between systems. Inbound emails can trigger workflows. Outbound calls run on schedule via the Task Engine.

It's easier to learn ActiveManage if you carry a mental model of how its parts relate. Here's the short version.

1. Data lives in datastores

Everything starts with a datastore. Customers, orders, leave requests, asset records, calendar bookings — each is a datastore with its own fields. Datastores can reference each other (a row in orders can link to a row in customers).

2. Forms write to datastores

A form (Custom Form or User Input View) collects input and writes a row into a datastore. UIVs add a workflow layer on top — the row moves through stages with email notifications and approvals.

3. Views read from datastores

Browse Views, Data Layouts, and Custom Query Views render datastore rows for end users. Each is configurable per role — what's visible, what's editable, which actions are exposed.

4. Permissions wrap everything

Every action on a datastore — read, write, edit, delete — is controlled by permissions granted to security groups. Users are added to security groups, either manually or via registration rules.

5. Notifications travel through configured channels

Email accounts, SMS senders, chat engines, and push notification channels are configured once and reused everywhere — UIVs, Tasks, Cart confirmations.

6. Pages, Dashboards, and Custom HTML wrap the user experience

The Page Builder lets you assemble end-user pages from blocks. Custom Dashboard Blocks build out reporting widgets. Custom HTML/JS/PHP can be dropped in where the platform doesn't already cover what you need.

7. The Task Engine glues it all on a schedule

Anything that should run automatically — scheduled reports, data syncs, recurring billing, cleanup jobs — lives in the Task Engine as a scheduled task with its own log.

ActiveManage doesn't lock you into one hosting model. The platform runs on a single shared PHP/MySQL server for small deployments, and scales up to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with sharded multi-tenant databases for large ones. The choice is driven by Site Settings rather than code changes.

Single-server deployments

The simplest setup: one PHP-capable web server (Apache or Nginx) plus one MySQL/MariaDB database. Suitable for internal tools, small SaaS products, or development environments. Sessions can live in file-based PHP sessions, Redis, or Memcached.

Multi-tenant shared database

For multi-tenant SaaS products, the default tenant database mode is shared — every tenant's rows live in the same physical database, distinguished by a tenantid column on each row. Cheap to run and trivial to back up.

Multi-tenant separate databases

For tenants that need stronger isolation (regulatory, performance, or just preference), switch tenant database mode to separate. Each tenant gets its own physical database. ActiveManage manages the connections automatically.

Database sharding

If you outgrow a single database server, enable Tenant Sharding. Tenant databases are distributed across multiple Database Host entries — each host is a separate MySQL/MariaDB server. Sharding can be paired with either shared or separate tenant database modes.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

If you set the Deployment Target in Site Settings to awsbeanstalk, the Deployments feature lets you deploy your ActiveManage application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk instances from inside the admin panel. Useful for autoscaling production deployments.