Organisations and workspaces

Organisations

An organisation is one customer of a Joripo server: its people, its workspaces, its forms and data, and its plan. Nothing crosses from one organisation to another. Asking for anything that belongs to another organisation, by any address or identifier, is answered as if it did not exist.

Every organisation has a server name: 3 to 40 lower-case letters, digits and single hyphens, starting with a letter (for example riverbank-research). It is chosen at sign-up or first-run setup (left blank, it is made from the organisation's name) and only the server's maintainer can change it. Joripo Collect asks for it at sign-in, ODK Collect's server URL contains it, and sign-in links carry it. You find it under Configure › Server settings › Server, with the address to sign in at.

An owner renames the organisation itself on the same page. Renaming moves no data.

Workspaces

A workspace groups forms with the people and device keys that work on them. An organisation can have as many as it needs: a baseline and an endline, two studies, two countries. Two workspaces of one organisation cannot share a name. Owners and managers create one with New workspace (or Create workspace on Design), and switch between them with the workspace menu at the top of the page.

Each workspace has a time zone. Days in the quality checks, the reports and the Data Explorer's filters are counted in it, so "interviews on 3 March" means 3 March where the fieldwork happens.

The form is the unit of separation

Inside a workspace, each form is on its own. Two forms in one workspace share nothing:

• each has its own questions and its own quality-check settings, so a 90-minute endline's duration check is never compared with a 5-minute listing form's;
• each has its own record of which question holds the enumerator, the start and end times, the GPS and the stratum;
• each has its own data, exported on its own.

This matters most when a workspace holds several questionnaires: the checks and the exports always take one form at a time.

Groups

On Design, forms and server datasets can be gathered into named groups with Create group or Organize. Only the grouping changes: a form in a group is exactly the form it was.

Archiving, deleting and restoring a workspace

A workspace's Settings page (owners and managers) holds its name and time zone, and:

• Archive, for when fieldwork is over. Phones and web forms can no longer send to it (unsent forms stay on the phones); everything in it can still be seen and exported. Restore makes it active again.
• Delete (owners only, by typing the workspace's name). It leaves every list, nobody can open it, and phones and web forms are refused, but nothing is erased. An owner restores it, with everything in it, from Workspaces › Deleted workspaces. Whoever worked in it at the moment it was deleted comes back with it; nobody gains a place in it later.

A workspace the server's maintainer has suspended or archived can only be restored by them.

Suspended organisations

The server's maintainer can suspend an organisation, for example when a contract ends. Every sign-in, every phone key and every web form of it is then refused, and phones keep what they hold. Nobody's account, phone or key is changed, so re-enabling the organisation restores it exactly as it was.

Renaming moves nothing

Renaming an organisation, a workspace or a form changes only its name. Where the data is stored never depends on a name, so nothing is moved and nothing can be lost by a rename.