Having multiple people make edits to a published survey in Survery123 Connect

Question

I am looking for ways to allow two or more people to edit a published survey in Connect. Currently, there are two people in my organization who create and publish. When one of us is in the field, the other needs to be able to make changes.

Is there a way to set connect's default local storage location to a shared drive so we both have access to the current version?

Is it possible to have the published form connect to a local copy, changing as needed?

Any other work arounds?

VanessaSimps · Answer

Our need isn't so much that we need to change our surveys often, it's that if changes ARE needed and the person who published the s123 is out, how do you back each other up? This is super frustrating!

Any ideas on how to share between GIS staff without having to publish a new copy of the survey.

dougbrowning · Answer

No.  The owner name and folder id are baked into the info file.  Cannot have 2 owners.

In one company we had a master AGOL account that we used to publish everything.  (Current IT will not let us but you may be able to.  That way anyone could do it.  123 is harder due to the files being in your profile.  So You would still need to copy the forms to the network, then copy them down into the other computer.  Remembering to do that every time could be an issue.  You could do the thing where it downloads updates from AGOL with the refresh button.  In the past the media folder could get weird with that but it may be ok now.

I have talked with the team on this a lot but it is more of a AGOL limitation than a 123 issue.

I would also look at your workflow and why you need to publish changes to Production that often.  I tend to hold changes till the next year.  Things like list updates I moved to hosted CSVs.

Hope that helps.

MatthewCarey · Answer

I haven't confirmed this for myself yet, but can't you use ArcGIS Online as the way of keeping the local copies in sync?

Maybe it's worth trying this:

-On the Collaborate page of the Survey when you're looking at it in your browser, click Update Survey on the left and share it with your colleague(s) using a shared update group.

-Then, in each of those colleague's Survey123 Connect, I'd expect the survey to be available to them, and if they use the Refresh button on that survey's thumbnail that would then download the latest version from the cloud for them to work on and potentially update.

Hope this might work for you, or I'm happy to hear feedback about why it doesn't!