00:00:00 Introduction

Everyone, we're going to go ahead and get started now. My name is Alex Bertram and I'm the technical director at BeDataDriven. I'm joined by a couple of other members of the team, including Shagun, who is the developer that has been working on this feature.

This webinar is mostly intended for those of you who are administering ActivityInfo databases and have questions about the new feature, what you can do with it, and how you can apply it to your own databases. If you're new to ActivityInfo or curious about the platform, I hope you'll learn a little bit about the system as well, but we're going to be mostly focusing on database administrators.

Today, we're going to look at the difference between personal reports and database reports. We will discuss what these two things are in ActivityInfo and why we introduced database reports. We will walk through how you can add reports to your database, why you would want to do that, and then we're going to take a deep dive into permissions because this is one of the more challenging aspects of this feature. Finally, we'll talk about some of the work that we have coming up related to databases.

00:01:32 Personal reports vs. database reports

To start with, what is the difference between a personal report and a database report in ActivityInfo? Personal reports are the feature that we have had forever in ActivityInfo. These allow individuals to create reports, and those reports stay owned by an individual. Each report is listed in the separate 'My reports' section. They can be shared with others and published, but they can only be edited by the owner. When viewing personal reports, each person only sees the data that they are allowed to see based on their permissions. It doesn't allow you to share the results of reports separately from the underlying data.

Database reports, which we created this week, are owned by a database. They are not linked to a single user account. They are listed together with your forms and folders in the database, and they can be edited by anyone with the right permissions, just like forms or folders. It also allows you to share the results of the reports with anyone who has view permissions, separate from giving them access to the database's underlying data.

00:03:00 Benefits of database reports

Why did we add this feature? First of all, we wanted to make reports easier to discover for users. Even though you can share a report right now, being able to add them into the database makes them an integral part of your database and makes it easier for your users to find them.

Secondly, you can share the reports without sharing the underlying data. This is very useful if you have sensitive data, like case management data. You might have personal data that you do not want to share with a large group, but you may want to share statistics—for example, how many men and how many women received a service by month. With this new feature, you can share those statistics and summaries with others in your database without sharing the underlying names and other personal details.

It also allows you to collaborate with many different people. Finally, it ensures that reports are not lost when their authors leave the organization. If you have somebody who is responsible for designing reports, those are not linked to their personal account, ensuring they stay with the database if that person leaves.

00:04:44 Adding reports to a database

Let's go through and see what this looks like now in ActivityInfo. I am going to turn to our 3W database here. In this database, I have a very simple form of a list of projects that are implemented by different organizations. This template uses some of our record-level permissions. If I log in as somebody who has limited permissions—for example, someone associated with Care International—I only see the record that is linked to me.

I am going to start by designing a report. I will go to the Analyze button and create a pivot table. I want to see who is doing what, so I will drag the organization onto the rows along with a count to see who is doing COVID-related projects. I will save this report and call it the "3W dashboard."

I can now choose where to save this. I'm going to save this in my database, in the root of the database. I could also choose to save it in "My reports," but I'm going to put it together here with the database. This report now features as part of my database. Next to my data entry form, I see this 3W dashboard. This will open up as a table in view-only mode, and you can click on the Edit button to make changes to the settings.

00:06:49 User experience and data visibility

Let's look at what this looks like if I invite my partners to the database. If I open this up and log in with my personal account, I can still only see the projects that are linked to my account in the data entry form. However, if I refresh my browser, I should now see this 3W dashboard. I can see all of the results that the author of this report has elected to share with me. I can't see details, for example, about where these projects are located or their budgets; I can only see the results of the project. Because I don't have permission, I'm not allowed to edit this report or include other data in this report other than what is shared.

That is different than the reports that show in "My reports." Those are personal reports. As a database user, as long as I have access to the data, I can create my own reports. However, a personal report will only include the data that I have access to. For example, if I am only allowed to see the results from CARE, my personal report will only reflect that. If I go back to the database report, the 3W dashboard, I can see all the partners, at least for the summary statistics that have been included.

00:08:35 Organizing and moving reports

If you have reports in your personal reports, you can still move them to a database, and in fact, we encourage you to do that. If you have reports that are important to your project that you would like to incorporate into your database, you can do so. If you don't own the report, you will have to first save it as a copy, and then you can choose which database you want to place it in.

You can also use the database settings to organize your reports. If you have many reports, you can create folders. You could create a folder just for reports and then move a report into that folder. You can then assign permissions; maybe you want to give only certain people access to this reports folder.

00:10:15 Understanding permissions

Let's take a look at how permissions work for database reports. Before, it was quite simple: if you have a personal report, whenever you view a report, your own permissions get applied. You can only see what you have access to.

With database reports, it is a bit different. Everybody sees the same results; otherwise, it would get confusing. It is important to note that even if you have access to only some records in a form, if you have access to the report, you can see the results of the report. That does not give you access to the underlying data. If I had very sensitive data about individuals, I could show totals or summaries and share those with people by giving them view permission, but that would not give them access to anything besides what appears in that report.

For edit permission, you can give people permission to edit forms, folders, and reports. This allows you to delegate the editing, adding, or deleting of forms or reports to other users. One thing that is important to note is that to effectively edit a report, you must also have access to all of the data included in that report. When you are editing a report, you are able to move things around and change what is presented. For that reason, you must have permission to view the data included in that report.

00:13:50 Trust and publishing rights

When you give somebody permission to edit a report, you are also allowing them to choose what is shared with other people because they can publish the report if they have that permission. You might feel comfortable sharing some parts of your data but not others. The permission that you give users should reflect how much trust you have in them to use their judgment regarding what to share.

For example, is it okay to share partner names? Maybe you don't want to share project locations. If I have edit permission to a report, I can choose to include the project locations in the report. By editing the report, I've changed the amount and the nature of data that has been disclosed. That is why you want to be careful where you give edit permission to a report.

This goes back to one of the permissions that we already have in ActivityInfo, which is the permission to publish data. When you create personal reports, you have the ability to publish those reports, making them available to anybody with the link. This is a sensitive operation because you could potentially take sensitive data and expose it. We have to be careful in ActivityInfo regarding who you allow to publish data. This permission is called the "Publish reports" permission.

You might elect not to give this permission if you trust someone to consult the data but not to decide what is fit for publishing. If you do give a person permission to publish reports, that extends to including data in another database. If the data is either public or you have the right to publish, then you can include it in the database. Once you have done that, it is no longer linked to your own personal permissions. If I leave your organization or my permission to publish reports is revoked, that data still remains part of the report; it doesn't break the report.

00:21:43 Conclusion

I think we will stop there for today. I apologize for the quality of the audio. For those of you joining us late, the recording will be on the website. This is a special update for database administrators working with ActivityInfo databases and reports. I hope that it has been informative and I hope you have a chance to try out the new functionality. Stay tuned for new developments on reports, as we are really focused on reports and data visualization this year and plan to add a lot of new features in the coming months. Thank you, have a great day.