Every IoT solution is an application. Every application is an App in Ubidots. Every App can have different organizations, users, dashboards, and branding to give your business or product the competitive advantage it needs to deploy an IoT innovative.
1. Ubidots App Development and Hierarchy
All Ubidots accounts begin with a single App that can be accessed by users under a specified permission role to view, create, or edit resources (Devices, Dashboards, Events, Tokens and End users) within the App. Here's a quick refresher of Ubidots' hierarchy:
Ubidots License Admin: A person who manages the Ubidots Account at industrial.ubidots.com, its App(s), Devices, Dashboards, Events, Organizations, Roles, and Users. Ubidots accounts may have one or several admins.
App: An IoT portal that contains organizations and is defined by a set of configurations for its appearance, domain, locale, visible features, and language.
Organization: An entity containing devices, dashboards, events, tokens, and users. Users may have permissions over one or multiple organizations.
Role: A group of permissions which specify the type of access (create, view, edit, and/or delete) a user has over the entities contained in the Organization(s) they belong to.
User: A password-protected account that has access to one or several Organizations through an App, and engages with them based on the particular Role that the user has been given.
2. App Components and Features
Any App(s) in Ubidots may contain the following components and features:
Dashboards: Display sensor data in in widgets for visualization and computation.
Alerts (or events): Actions triggered when data readings fulfill or exceed a design rule. Alerts include SMS, Telegram, webhook, or setting up a new variable (e.g., send an alert when a device stops sending data).
Analytics: Mathematical, statistical, and serverless cloud functions to extract, transform, schedule, and analyze data.
Exporting: Ubidots lets you export your data in CSV files.
Sharing capabilities: Ubidots lets you share dashboards and widgets by embedding URLs into the HTML of websites.
User Management: An administrator grants custom access and interaction capabilities for a given user.
Device Management: Ubidots lets you control your devices remotely from the front end. For example, turn your devices ON/OFF with a simple Switch widget in a dashboard.
3. Who can Access an App?
Ubidots powered Apps can be accessed by any:
Users that are created within an Ubidots account. Users of an Ubidots powered App can be granted access to nearly any capability within Ubidots. Any permission users have can be edited or managed in the Roles section of your App's User Management.
4. White-label Branding an App
Within any Ubidots owner/admin account multiple Apps can be created and managed. By clicking the "Apps" tab in the main nav-bar of your Ubidots account, you'll find all live Apps in that account. Each additional App deployed in Ubidots ($49 for a gray-labeled app, $149 for a white-labeled one) can be branded and have different Organizations assigned to it with underlying Roles and Users.
Deploying a new App is as easy as clicking on the "+" button:
White-label Branding: By clicking the pencil icon you will be able to adjust the user interface of your App, including the login portal, the App's colors, backgrounds, icons, favicons, and more.
5. When might I need a second App?
One question we get a lot at Ubidots is when to purchase a second App vs. the free second Organization. Simply, if you wish to apply different, customized white-label branding experiences for end-users, then a second App is required.
For example, your client "ABC Hospital" wishes to monitor hospital beds through a portal with their own branding and logos, so you deploy one App for them; but then you get another client, "XYZ Care", who also monitors beds but wishes to do so under their own branding, so you purchase a second App. However, if these two clients simply wish to monitor beds and access their Dashboards, Devices, and Data (regardless of the portal's branding); this can easily be done with a single App and multiple Organizations.