Why you should use Survey 123, even if you don’t care about location.
Are you planning a large scale data-collection project?
Did you assume Survey 123 is only relevant for collecting location info?
I once thought like you.
A few years ago I was leading a pilot for a software panic button. Each installation of the software had to be associated with a specific location that security would respond to if the end user activated the system. Once the software was pushed to a few thousand machines, our team started sweeping through the facilities and configuring workstations.
This process was massively more difficult than anticipated. Waiting for computers to startup when they weren’t powered on, finding the user who was logged into a workstation left idle, computers that hadn’t yet installed the application. There were countless things that added time to the process and resulted in the need for multiple trips to a space.
When the announcement came that the software would be deployed to all facilities in Southern California (Going from a few thousand machines to nearly 100,000), I dreaded repeating the process on an exponentially larger scale. I hatched a plan to make my life easier and save tens of thousands in labor costs.
Working with our software vendor, I ensured that workstations could be remotely configured if we had the right information. This meant that we didn’t need to ever be logged into any of the workstations. All we needed was the machine name with a location and the machine name could be determined from the barcoded asset tag on the CPU. No more waiting for machines to boot. No more searching for users. We could just scan the asset tag, document the location and move on.
As I developed the workflow and strategized how to effectively manage things at such a large scale, I had dreams of maps that would clearly show what areas our team had covered already. Because of this, I started configuring the data collection form in Survey 123. However, it soon became apparent that cleaning, geo-referencing and loading thousands of floorplans into layers would be a massive project unto itself.
With capturing locations on a map no longer part of the process, I assumed I should switch to a different survey platform. That was the whole reason for using Survey 123, after all.
However:
- No other platform I looked at had anywhere near the level of customization and features.
- Putting data into the ArcGIS platform meant that we could interact with it using an ecosystem of tools.
We stuck with Survey 123 and these are the key features that made it so valuable?
- Lookup Tables- We were able to scan a barcode on the asset tag of each workstation to get the asset tag number of the computer. What we needed to configure the application was the computer’s full machine name however. With Survey 123, I was able to setup the survey to automatically query a report from our IT Department to connect the Asset Tag number with the computer’s machine name and populate that data in the survey.
This could be used both to add additional data to the survey results and to provide immediate feedback to the survey end users based on their input.
2. Dynamic Choice Lists- The facilities we needed to cover composed hundreds of thousands of square feet across a wide geographic region. For each computer we needed to know the building, floor, department and room it was in. Using selection lists would prevent typos and speed up data entry but once the user got to the department level the length of the list would become a hinderance. Survey 123 takes care of this problem by allowing you to filter the options in a choice list based on previous answers. So, when the team chose a department they could easily select from a short list of options that existed within the building and floor they had already chosen.
3. Question Relevance- Despite the improved process, there were still times that the team would need to return to a location. Either to find the laptop that went with an empty docking station or to get access to a locked area. Enabling question relevance allowed me to configure multiple workflows within the same survey. Users would first answer whether they needed to collect data or note an area for followup. Depending on the answer they would be presented only with questions relevant to that task.
4. Regular Expressions- There are a number of different data points barcoded on the workstations we were surveying. To ensure that we were getting the Asset Tag and not a Serial Number or other attribute, I added a constraint to the input field using a regular expression. This ensured that the data entered matched the standard Asset Tag format and would alert the end user if they accidentally scanned something different or got a bad scan due to a damaged tag.
Search “Regular Expressions” in the documentation below for more info.
5. Ecosystem- Because Survey 123 uploads data into a feature layer on ArcGIS Online or your ArcGIS Enterprise server, you then can use all the tools of the ESRI ecosystem to interact with the data. This became extremely valuable when late in the process our software vendor discovered that they needed the Gateway IP of each machine in addition to the machine name in order to have the data load properly. Since some machines move, it was critical that the IP information be current as of the day that the data was collected for the machine. I was able to use the ArcGIS API for Python to query a nightly network DNS report and populate the Gateway IP of all machines that were collected the previous day.
6. JavaScript Integration- Recently I was asked if this data collection process could be applied to another project at work. In the process of setting up a demo I came across a new feature in Survey 123 that was not available when I last worked with it heavily. You now have the ability to integrate JavaScript into your survey and have scripts run with question responses as inputs. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that I have not yet had the opportunity to explore.
Note:
These advanced features require leveraging the free Survey 123 Connect Application and direct manipulation of the XML Form.
Conclusion:
Survey 123 is a robust survey platform that should you should consider, regardless of whether you are collecting location dependent data. If your organization is already using ArcGIS Online or an ESRI Enterprise server, the added bonus is that Survey 123 has no additional cost beyond data storage.
