Organizations in mWater provide a scalable, structured way to manage users, surveys, and deployments across projects and teams. By creating a branch-based hierarchy, you can assign permissions, monitor activity, and coordinate deployments efficiently without needing to configure each element individually.
Organizations make management at scale much easier by creating a hierarchy where users are added to individual branches. They
allow you to manage permissions,deploy surveys,and keep an eye on what is happening with your data collection and management. There is no limit to how large you scale your organization: Local organizations and utilities, international organizations, and whole national systems can be managed by using this feature.
If you are only filling in a small number of surveys for a small number of users, you may not need this feature. Otherwise, it's a good idea to set one up early on.
This guide covers the basics of creating and editing orgs, and managing users and deployments through organizations.
The Key Benefits of Organizations:
Add and remove users in one place, and not separately for each survey, deployment and visualization
Organizations make management at scale much easier by creating a
tree-like hierarchy where users are added to individual branches.
Each organization has one or more branches, and each branch can have its own groups of Admins, Managers, Viewers, and Team members.
Permissions to Surveys, Deployments, Dashboards, etc. can be granted to whole branches and teams within them.
Users can be part of multiple organization branches, and even multiple organizations.
After
you’ve setup your organization in the system, you can add entire
organization branches as viewers, managers, or admins to your surveys or
data visualizations. Just add a new user to the right branch, and they
will automatically get the permissions they need for all the assets that
have the branch in their permissions. Administrators can see what’s
happening in the branches below them, while users in one branch don’t
see or get to edit data from the surveys in other branches unless you
explicitly allow them to. This makes it very easy to manage users in your deployments as you just add the user to one team or branch as necessary, and then remove them later. You will not need to check each survey and survey deployment to see whether the user has access.
You can conveniently remove users from the Users tab and Activity Summary tabs.
Editing organizations
You can look at organizations you are part of and create new ones under Manage -> Organizations. If you are an admin of an organization, you can add new branches by hovering over an existing one and selecting + Add Branch. You can set up the branches as you like and as best works for your organization, for example, by department or by geography.
You can add members to branch groups by first clicking into a branch.
Most users only need to be part of one organization but if you want to create a new one, simply click the Create New Organization on the Manage -> Organizations page.
Note that organization admins have an advanced feature available in the Settings tab of branches where they can move branches around.
Managing users
Each branch has the following groups:
Admins - They can add and remove branches, create and remove teams, and add users to teams.
Managers - They are automatically added as Managers into deployments made from this branch.
Viewers - They are automatically added as Viewers into deployments made from this branch.
User-defined Teams - An additional group type often used for assigning enumerators.
Permissions given at the org top
branch flow downwards. So, if someone is a viewer at the top branch,
they are also a viewer on every lower branch. Permissions on other
branches don't flow down.
We
recommend that you use the organization branch groups to then manage
permissions in you surveys, deployments and visualizations as much as
possible. This makes user management much easier, because if a user
joins or leaves your organization, you don't need to go through all the
surveys which they are part of or should be part of. Instead you just
add or remove the user from the organization structure. Then their
permissions will update accordingly across all the places where the
branch group has been assigned.
Example user configuration
Additional information
- The Collaborators tab allows you to bring groups and branches from other organizations to your branch so that they get permissions within your branch.
- The Users, Activity Summary and Activity Log tabs within branches help admins see what users have been doing.
Collaborators are groups that have access to a branch, but are not part of the organization. They can see and edit data that any other team within the branch can see and edit. They allow another organization to fully collaborate at a branch level, without being managed by the parent organization.
Managing deployments
Deployments can be managed either directly from surveys, or through organizations. Whenever you intend to use the platform for more than one data collection, we recommend you use organizations.
Managing deployments is straightforward: Just select the organization branch and navigate to the Deployments branch. Here you will see the deployments relevant to this branch, and all branches below it. The tab also shows whether a deployment is active or not, and how many responses it has that are visible to you.
The Deployments tab of a branch
Settings
There are a number of settings you can control at the head office and branch level.
Branch settings:
Here you can change the name and description of the branch.
You can also choose to manage sites at the branch level. Typically, we recommend you set the entire organization in the Managed By-field when you created sites, but if you want more detailed control over who can view and edit your sites, you can do so at the branch level. Higher level branches will still see these sites.
If you enable Site Management you can further enable some other options. You can enable site approvals. If you do, changes made to sites managed by this organization or branch will become visible in the Site Approvals page. There you can roll back changes after they have been made.
You can also Restrict Changes to Sites, which then limits the users who can add, edit or delete sites to the ones you specify.
Finally, you can customize water asset properties. Water assets have a long list of properties as defined in the Water Asset Standard, but not all of them are enabled by default. Here you can toggle those properties on and off, so that they will appear in assets managed by this organization or branch.
Access codes make it easy for users to join your organization or branch at the right level. They can enter the code in their App or on the orgs page to join the organization.
Downloading organization data creates an export of all the survey designs, survey responses and sites linked to the organization. It is a very easy way for you to get a backup of your data in mWater.
With Advanced Settings you can change the parent branch of the current branch, so essentially reorganize your organization structure. You can also delete the branch or organization. Accidental deletions can be reversed by contacting us at info@mwater.co.
Changes made to settings need to be explicitly saved by clicking the Save button.
Addition Top Branch options:
At the highest branch of your organization, you can also toggle the option New branches can manage sites/assets by default. This makes it so that any new branch created in the organization will have site management turned on by default. This feature links up with the Custom app configs which make it easier to automate assigning the correct permissions within your organization.
Example Organization: Large NGO
Example of Large NGO organization structure - tree view
