ERP system for staff admins - managing complex information tree

Question

I'm re-creating an internal ERP tool to manage user license, sales and customer information for a desktop 3D cad software. So something similar as an admin portal for Autodesk employees to manage user licenses for different products they have (Maya, 3dsmax, AutoCAD, etc). We have a legacy dongle security hardware that needs to be maintained for old users, but we will also implement cloud so we can transition from an old business model to a new one.

One simple case is the user is having trouble assigning a license to someone in his team.

Note1: 90% of the user base has 3 licenses in a team of 4 people. While we have a few companies with 100 licenses or more.

Note2: Dongle Assignment does not give permission for the user to use a software, it is used for tech support do decide if that license is entitled to support or if the dongle was stolen.

Note3: Cloud license will be implemented but I don't have information on that yet. That will be displayed be also included in that screen.

Note4: There is a multitude of products under one dongle hardware and also my company will have a cloud license (under development). The tricky part is that since we have legacy users and data, I cannot simplify the data structure and these fields because we cannot change current dongle hardware in the market, as they don't have 2-way communication with the database and the dongle. I need to work with what I have so impact is minimum when implementing the new system.

Answer 1

No, it is not the right pattern.

Search should be universal and filterable, like it is on all major sites nowadays, eg. linkedin, facebook, google.

Normally, a technical solution for this would be a special full text engine, like solr, lucene, sphinx or ElasticSearch. Since these are kind of off-the-shelf solutions, price depends on your development team’s willingness to either integrate one of these or develop a full text search capacity themselves (possibly using a built-in function provided by your database vendor).

If a user might have multiple licenses, then the licenses might be grouped by user using a list inlay pattern.