Usage of Kobo for a busines

[Bergie]

Good day

I've been using Google app engine for hosting my forms and is interested in using Kobo by simply changing the submission URL of the forms.

The main reason is that App engine limits has been hit often enough, and it is a royal pain (for me) to upload and update the version and instances. I need simpler. :-)

There is no humanitarian view on this form, it is purely business - the company makes money but not from ODK, but the forms I use is because I see no need to fill in a paper form, then manually enter the data into some spreadsheet etc. We have been using a few forms over a year or two and its saved use enormous amounts of hassle. I am trying my best to get the company to bite into the idea - my manager is now pushing it as he can see the benefit of the ODK - we were the only employees with ACCURATE log sheets.

• Anyway, what I like to know, what is the business usage restrictions on KoboToolbox? 
  
• Do we we need a paid license?
  
• What is the daily upload  limit?
  
• How many forms can we store?
  
• How many submissions can we store in total or per form?
• How secure is the data? (i.e. can the website administrators get access to our data?)
  
• What is the maximum storage space we can have if we add a "picture" question?
  
• Should we go somewhere else if we want business usage? :-)
  

If we adopt ODK on a company wide basis, there could be 5000+ submissions per week over all forms, so for now it could be fine for a small regional office, but what to do in future? I want to propose a company wide strategy if possible. 

Kind regards

[Tino Kreutzer]

Hi Bergie,

Good questions. KoBoToolbox is completely free and there are no costs involved, nor are there any premium services available that would require payments. ​If you are working for a humanitarian organization you can use the server hosted by OCHA (http://kobo.humanitarianresponse.info), without any restrictions on the number of submissions, forms, or projects. Our own server (http://kf.kobotoolbox.org) can be used by everyone else, but we ask each user to remain below the limit of 10,000 submissions as well as 5GB file uploads per user per month. We might increase this number in the future, but for the time being we want to avoid that a small number of very heavy users are slowing down the server and user experience for everyone else. 

We take the protection of collected data very seriously. We use Amazon Web Services (AWS), together with best practice tools and mechanisms to keep data safe from intrusion or loss. AWS security information can be found on this page: http://aws.amazon.com/security. In addition we do regular database backups to protect against any eventuality. The privacy policy and terms of use are both found here: https://kf.kobotoolbox.org/accounts/register/. Once your data is received on the server it is stored in accounts protected by usernames and passwords. However, unless it was encrypted on the handset (see this article: http://support.kobotoolbox.org/customer/portal/articles/1948428-encrypting-forms), it will be stored 'in the clear' on the server filesystem or within its database, which means that server administrators could potentially access it. For kobo.humanitarianresponse.info and kc.humanitarianresponse.info only the server administrator has technical access to the database, and we are all committed to protecting the privacy of users' data. However, to have complete control and ownership of your data, you are also free to install an instance of KoBoToolbox on your own server.

Hope this helps. 

Best,

Tino

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Kobo Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to kobo-users+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to kobo-...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/kobo-users.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Bergie]

Thank you

I believe I will start a test run on Kobo quite soon on my private account for now. I am considering encrypting, but will have to understand the process better. For the ODK I did tell my manager to get the IT department to run our own server. I've done it on my own PC some years ago, but it was too inconvenient for me. 

As a side note: I think that the ODK platform have enormous potential as an enterprise tool if used correctly. Right now I have used a simple mileage log for vehicles. It is so  much easier than filling in a piece of paper and then transfer it to a spreadsheet. I have a maintenance sheet with some 80 or so fields, including battery logs. There is also a network test - still in alpha where network problems are logged with GPS coords so we can compare improvement etc. Right now I am working on a spares log. My intentions is also to make a "neighbourhood watch" form whereby suspicious activity can be logged or patrollers can fill in detail electronically.

• The biggest improvement I could see is if there was some way of dynamically pushing a new version of the sheet to a device. Say for instance a new vehicle was bought and I need to add that to the pool of selections. Ideally a device should do a quick check to see if a newer version of a sheet exist, and then overwrite the old one, before allowing it to be filled in. To keep data integrity the old version can be stored as is. This is what I do at the moment in any case.
  

• Next up on my list is to get data from the server and pre-populate a form. Example: I filled in a maintenance sheet and noted issues. At a later stage a colleague arrive on site, select the site and the previous data is loaded so he can immediately see of there was/is a problem, or who was the monkey that did not fix the problem! :-) 
  

For now, I am wowed by the effort that people put into ODK as I understand very little about the nuts and bolts of the project. And BTW. When I talk about ODK I mean the platform including ODK, Kobo and others. I am not sure if there is a "correct" generic term for the platforms.

Regards 

[Tino Kreutzer]

Hi Bergie,

You're right - very powerful tools indeed. The two feature suggestions you mentioned are actually ones we're working on and will be publishing in the coming weeks and months. The second one is quite a bit more complex and our initial implementation through so-called external itemsets will still require you to provide the to-be-filled information in the form of a CSV file; automatic updating based on previously collected information is further down the road. 

Best,

Tino

--