Hello. I work for a company that rents, maintains, and sells forklifts. My boss mentioned that they would benefit from a solution that allows them to complete field reports digitally.
Currently, they record field information on paper, but it would be better if that format could be transferred to a digital one to be filled out via phone. After researching possible solutions, I came across this tool called ODK. Based on my investigation and the tests I've done, this tool fits our situation perfectly.
The catch is that in addition to data collection by the company's specialized staff, each completed form requires client verification, along with the actual data. Additionally, we need to be able to view the data from a given form as a document. Perhaps using ODK's API, the database information could be passed to another app to generate the document in a polished format that can be shared with the client via a link.
Overall, the idea would be for our specialized staff to fill in the information, then generate a polished document with that data to be sent to the client through some channel (e.g., email). Afterwards, the client would need to verify in some way that they received that information (perhaps with a second verification form). Finally, this data submitted by the staff via ODK would be used within the company to generate a final report, which would streamline the work because the field report would be entirely digital.
Do you think something like this would be feasible in practice? I believe so, but I would like to know your opinion.
Yes it would be possible to do this as far as I'm aware. My assumption is that your users all use email for verifcation.
Here are some helpful resources to start:
These give you static attachments in an email that you could include a follow-up form for the user to click they have verified (Including an ID from the original submission. However, if you were wanting your users that have been emailed not just to verify/view, but to be able to change data, you could do this using a pre-filled URL.
Note, that ODK via web browsers is currently under a big transition from Enketo to Web Forms. Essentially Enketo is no longer being developed and a new architecture is being created for making Web Forms easier to maintain long-term and improve performance/features..
I’m testing some on them. Maybe that mail merge suggestion will not work in my case… but that webhook project looks interesting. I was thinking of using n8n to deploy my workflow, maybe that project will make that possible.