Sharing Your Project and Managing Permissions

Last updated: 25 Aug 2022

KoboToolbox allows you to give different levels of access to different users by setting flexible permission levels within each project. While most users may only need to manage a single account to access, enter and review data for a given project, sometimes more complex scenarios require multiple users with different levels of access.

For example, you can share a project with some users and only allow them to submit data to the project through their account, and adjust the settings such that others can only view or edit the submitted data.

This article describes how you can grant permissions for other KoboToolbox users to collaborate on your projects.

Requiring passwords for accessing Enketo web forms

By default, KoboToolbox only requires a username and password for accessing data and managing your projects. When a project has been deployed, the Enketo web form can be accessed by anyone who knows its URL. In this case, any individual with access to the form URL can send submissions to the project.

In some cases, you may wish to limit data entry to require that individuals be logged into their KoboToolbox user accounts.

• Go to ACCOUNT SETTINGS inside your KoboToolbox account

• Check “Require authentication to see forms and submit data”

Setting forms to require authentication can only be set globally for all the projects in your account and not for individual projects.

Sharing a project with other users and setting their permissions

The following steps show how you can share a project with other KoboToolbox users and control which users can view, share, or edit your form or submissions.

• Go to the Sharing tab in the SETTINGS page in your data collection project

• Enter the username of the user who you would like to share the form with

• Select the desired permission level

• Click GRANT PERMISSIONS

Available permissions

• View form

• Edit form

• View submissions

• Add submissions

• Edit submissions

• Validate submissions

• Delete submissions

• Manage project

Some permissions automatically grant other permissions. For example, if a user is granted “Add submissions” they will also be granted “View form.”

Assigning “Add submissions” rights for specific users

If you have enumerators in the field collecting data, you might want to ensure they are not able to see any of the data that has been submitted.

In this case, instead of configuring KoboCollect with a single account’s username and password, you can create separate accounts for each enumerator, and share the form with limited permissions.

In KoboToolbox:

• Create an all enumerator accounts on the same server

• Share the project with each enumerator account using the steps described above, only giving them limited permissions (such as “Add Submissions”).

In KoboCollect:

• On each device, configure KoboCollect using the username and password of the enumerator who will be using it. You can learn more about how to configure KoboCollect here.

Row-level permissions for users

You can also set row-level permissions for users which can be helpful in several scenarios:

• An organization implementing a project in collaboration with several partner organizations may want to give the partners access to only the data collected by them.

• A researcher may want to allow each enumerator access to the data only they collected and be able to make edits.

• In an organization, there may be clear roles of data collectors who may only be allowed to submit data, data quality officers who may only be allowed to view and validate submissions, and users who may be allowed to view reports and download the data.

Setting row-level permissions:

• Share the data collection project using the steps described above

• Choose from View Submissions only from specific users, Edit Submissions only from specific users, Validate Submissions only from specific users, or Delete Submissions only from specific users

• Add a comma-separated list of usernames with whom you want to share the project

Copy permissions from another project

To copy team permissions from a another project, click on “Copy team from another project” located at the bottom of the page and select the project to copy from.

This will overwrite any existing sharing settings already defined on the current project.

Removing shared projects from your account

To remove projects that were shared with your account by others:

• On the project list, point your mouse on the project name and click the More action button

• Click Remove shared form

• Click REMOVE

Making your project and data public

In addition to sharing your project with specific users, you can also make your form and submissions public:

• Go to the Sharing tab in the SETTINGS page in your data collection project.

• Select the options Anyone can view this form or Anyone can view submissions made to this form.

A URL will be displayed, which you can share with anyone to provide access to the form and/or the submission data without logging in. If the form is made public, anyone with the link may be able to:

• Preview the form

• Download the form as XLS or XML

In addition, if the data is also public:

• View the data in the Table view

• View and print Reports

• View the Gallery

• Download the data

• View the data in the Map view

Here we can see what parts of the project the public will have access to when they open the URL.