SurveyCTO Server Management

change name to SCTO Server management

In SurveyCTO, all questionnaires and data associated with a project is uploaded to a server. Server sound technical but from the perspective of the user experience, it is nothing more complicated than opening a internet browser and logging in to your project's account on SurveyCTO's website. We will keep using the term "server" but for most purposes it can just as well be thought of as an "account".

The project team uploads questionnaire to the server

If you are working on a DIME project and you are still just developing your questionnaire, please read about DIME's development server first.

Read fist

• If you update your server, you must update the SurveyCTO Collect app on all tablets using that server

Plans

SurveyCTO offers multiple types of plans that suit different project's needs. This section described what features have made different DIME project to use different plans. For full details on the plans, see http://www.surveycto.com/plans.html.

Free Plans

There is one free plan that is an option for new users that wants to explore SurveyCTO. In return for using the free account the user needs to be an active user in the forums on SurveyCTO's website. DIME projects can instead use DIME's development server that is free of charge to the project team. The only reason for a DIME project have this plan is if the project wants to upload test data but cannot set up a server yet (project funding not dispersed yet) or do not want to set up a paid server yet (data collection is still several months away and these test submissions are very temporary).

Paid Plans

In addition to cost, the two main differences between the free plan and the paid plan is that you are not required to participate in the formums when using a paid plan, and a paid plan gives you access to contacting SurveyCTO's support.

There are three paid plans and they differ in two aspects, limits and features. All servers have limits in terms of number of questionnaires on the server, amount of data submitted to the server etc.

Keeping your server up to date

SurveyCTO regularly releases updates for the servers. These updates are not automatically pushed to all servers as one should be careful if updating a server during an ongoing survey. Each version of the survey comes with a corresponding version of the Android app SurveyCTO collect. There is a risk of the communication between the Collect app and the server will have errors if the version of the Android app does not correspond to the version of the server. Ultimately, this can lead to corrupted or lost data.

When you start a new server, you get the latest version by default. It is recommended that the server is updated between each survey round when no data collection is going on. After the server is updated, all tablets need to be updated as well. The only way to guarantee that the