Myth #4 — I would never externalize my admin panel’s development

Building your own operational admin panel from scratch is a lot of work and requires a lot of internal resources, but you often consider this to be unavoidable, a necessary evil. Because you have an operationally intense company, you believe that having to spend large amounts of time and resources is part of the game.

What if I told you that this does not have to be the case? What if I told you that there is a SaaS solution that could dramatically reduce the investments your company has to make to scale your operations with a state-of-the-art operational admin panel?

In response, you might immediately say “I would never externalize or outsource my admin panel’s development”. If I asked you “why?” you would most likely list any or all of the following reasons:

1. We can’t be restrained by an external platform to create and maintain the technological edge in our internal admin panel tools.
2. A generic tool cannot address my specific business needs.
3. Our operational admin panel is core to our business, so we cannot afford to externalize the responsibility of making sure it is always up and running.
4. We cannot afford to have an external admin panel tool as we need to ensure ownership and security of our data.

Using the Forest Admin Panel Framework, however, can provide you with the tools and building blocks to set-up your operations for success in a scalable, versatile, reliable and secure way in no time.

1. Scalability

“We can’t be restrained by an external platform to create and maintain the technological edge in our internal admin panel tools.”

We obviously understand this concern, yet at Forest Admin, we believe that it takes experts to provide you with the best possible admin panel building blocks. That is why we invest in bringing together some of the best developers with lots of expertise on the subject to work on providing you with the platform to power your operations.

Besides, plenty of scale-ups are using the Forest Admin Panel Framework and plan to continue doing so, such as Qonto, Apartment List and Puma.

Lastly, we are a transparent company that ensures that on a technical level the product and its roadmap is crystal clear and pushing forward the global standards. We open-source our code and use a public roadmap that is fueled by our users. This way you and your teams always have insight into how, when and why we are building the best framework for your development team.

2. Versatility

“A generic tool cannot address my specific business needs.”

Forest Admin is an adaptable operational admin panel framework that gives your development teams the building blocks to translate your specific business processes into flows that work for you and your teams, in minutes. We do all the heavy lifting for all the basic features that all operational admin panels require. On top of this, we empower you with our Smart Features that can be used to extend our admin API in any way that you see fit.

All the workflows that are really specific to your business and that make up your competitive advantage, can be implemented easily using the Forest Admin framework. This innate flexibility is why we have a very broad scope of companies using Forest Admin ranging from healthcare companies, to mobility companies or FinTechs.

3. Reliability

“Our operational admin panel is at the core of our business, so we cannot afford to externalize the responsibility of making sure it is always up and running.”

At Forest Admin, we know and understand that your operational admin panel is the pumping heart of your operations, and therefore go to extreme lengths to make sure it is always pumping. We provide you with a fail-safe and stable platform, which is not easy to achieve when you build your own in-house tool from the ground up.

We do not host your data nor your code, we only store your user interface. For this part (i.e. pushing your specific user interface to your local server) we can provide you with a contingency plan and a service level agreement. So we guarantee there is no reason to have concerns about the uptime of your Forest Admin panel, which solves an important operational headache. In order to fortify this, we have added reliability features such as restoring your configuration to a previous layout and the implementation of a status page to the Forest Admin roadmap.

4. Security

“We cannot afford to have an external admin panel tool because we need to be able to guarantee both ownership and security of our data.”

Most importantly, while using the Forest Admin panel framework, your data is and will always remain yours. We have in no way access to your proprietary information. Forest Admin does not host your data, we only host the user interface in which your teams see your data and perform actions on it. Check out more details on our Data and Security Features here.

Secondly, building a secure internal team structure for accountability purposes is a large pain, yet one that is required to meet legal requirements. When using the Forest Admin Panel Framework you get off-the-shelf access to, among other things, the most granular team permissions possible, a downloadable activity log and approval workflows which participate in the reliability and the accountability of your operations.

Conclusion

To summarize, we understand why teams traditionally assume they should build their operational admin panels internally but challenge them on that premise. If you are building an operationally intense company that requires an internal tool to power your operations, you should consider looking into external frameworks and platforms. At Forest Admin, we are building a scalable, versatile, reliable and secure platform, designed to give your operations the admin panel they deserve, from day one without the huge investment normally required to do so.