Custom configurations allow you to extensively customize the look, feel and functionality of mWater for your own organization.

This article describes all of the functionality provided by a custom configuration so you can decide whether it is the right approach for you. To discuss enabling custom configurations for your organization via a one-off contract with mWater, contact info@mwater.co.

Basics

For each custom configuration you make you can configure the following basic parameters

Name
Description
Branding
Problem Report Email addresses - who receives problem reports
Header and footer images to include visual branding on the App home page

Functionality toggles

mWater has a broad and increasing range of functionality. To ensure that you have the appropriate set available for your enumerators the configuration allows you to toggle each of the following on or off:

Show Map Tab
Show Mini Map on Home Page
Default filter map to organization's sites
Enable Issues
Enable Assignments
Enable Barcode Scan Searching
Show Public Surveys on Survey Tab
Enable instant water point updates of functional status via dropdown
Enable instant health facility updates of functional status via dropdown

Adjusting for limited connectivity

You can save mobile data and speed up continuous data syncing in conditions of poorer connectivity by choosing to compress images. Through the config manager you can set the global maximum image size at 1 Megapixel (100K), 2 Megapixels (180K), 3 Megapixels (250K), 4 Megapixels (300K) or Full Resolution (up to 4MB per image).

If you know your enumerators will be working offline for a long time, you can adjust the amount of offline site codes each device carries with it. Since each site requires its own unique code new sites can only be created whilst there are unused site codes remaining on the device. The default is set to 200.

Site Types

Not all site types provided by mWater may be necessary for your data collection and you may find that there are certain fields you would like to include in the site types that you do select so with the Site Types configuration you can choose the site types as well as choose which data fields for those site types should be available to users of your app config.

With each site type you can set a default entry for Managed By as well as default roles for who should Administer and who should view those sites. If you set these defaults then you can also hide the option to change these from enumerators so you can ensure that the sites get entered for the right organization branch and administered by the right people.

For each data field or property you can toggle:

Is it required
Should the title be shown
Should it be included in the list view
Should it be included in the summary view
Should it be included in the edit view
Any conditionality that should govern when this data field is shown, for example a photo could be required only if no GPS coordinates are provided

Entirely custom site fields can be created for you as part of the custom configuration process.

You can also customize the workflow from the app Site section further by adding any amount of tasks to available in this view. These can be specific surveys, issues or URLs. A use case could be for example to structure a data collection's workflow to help enumerators proceed systematically. For example:

Create the community site
Fill the community survey
Create the institution site
Fill the institutional survey

If you want to set site permissions in a more nuanced way within an app config, you can do it through setting default access by group. This way, if you are managing a large process across many areas, you can ensure that one group always has appropriate permissions for the sites they create, and also ensure that other groups don't accidentally have more permissions than they should.

In other words, take an example where you have an organization with branches for countries A, B, and C. When users in your Country A branch create a site, you can set it to always be Managed By Country A and Private by default. For users who are part of Country C, you can set the sites to be Managed By Country C and be Protected by default, and so on.

When creating such rules, you'll need to set them up for each site type and relevant group appropriately.

Also, note that the system checks for access based on which groups the user is in and goes with the first available match. The system allows users to be in any number of groups and branches. Therefore, to make best use of this feature, it is recommended that org admins ensure that users are only part of the branch that they have these advanced rules for.

In other words, a user who operates in Country A should then only be part of the Country A branch and not also Country B for this feature to work as expected. If there is a rule that matches a user with Country A's access rules, that rule will be applied and any rules for Country B will not be applied for that user since a suitable match has already been found.

In order to enable site management by organization branches, please contact us at info@mwater.co

Home Page & Start Survey Tasks

You can customize the workflow and available surveys for each of your custom configs easily via the Home Page Tasks and Start Survey Tasks sections. You can select which surveys, tasks or URLs are visible right on the App home page. By specifying which surveys are part of the app config, you exclude all other surveys so the enumerators will have an easier time selecting the right ones.

You can also rename and describe the surveys and in this way contextualize global or country-wide surveys to a specific configuration without changing the survey itself.

Site Caching

You can enhance the offline functionality of the app in the config by caching a set amount of designated sites on your enumerators' devices when they go to the field. As long as they have synced first, they can then operate in areas with poor connectivity and link their surveys to already mapped sites.

The custom configuration allows you to setup rules for which site types to cache, who should have this rule applied to them, which administrative regions should be included in the caching, whether to limit the sites to ones managed by certain organizations and adjust the maximum number of sites being synced.

Using custom configs

Example