The Metatude software suite consists of four different components:
| · | The Metatude Dialogue Server (MDS)
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| · | The Metatude Project Manager (MPM)
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| · | The Metatude Dialogue Designer (MDD)
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| · | The Metatude Channel Integration Components (MCIC)
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The basis of the Metatude architecture is a central server (Metatude Dialogue Server) that needs to be installed in your organization. This server maintains the connections with databases, stores and serves the dialogues to stakeholders and collects and stores the collected data in a database.
Once the Dialogue Server is installed, you can manage any stakeholder feedback with two desktop applications that are relevant for the regular user: the Metatude Dialogue Designer and the Metatude Project Manager. Consultants, managers and researchers can use these two applications to prepare questionnaires and manage projects involving stakeholder feedback.
In addition to these components, some additional infrastructure needs to be present in order to have a working setup of Metatude. The following figure shows the Metatude software components, and how they are integrated with the existing infrastructure.
Figure 1: The Metatude Infrastructure
The components that you need to have installed in your network are:
| · | SMTP Server, this is used to send e-mail invitations to stakeholders.
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| · | Web Server, for serving the dialogues to stakeholders.
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| · | An empty database, for storing the results of your surveys.
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| · | A directory server or database that contains stakeholder information.
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These components can be installed on the same machine as the one that is used for the MDS, or can be anywhere on the network the MDS has access to (intranet and/or internet). Seperate machines for these components will enhance the overall performance of the system. In the following chapters, these components are described in more detail.