A cleaner day for data collectors — the collector role in OrionForms

Data collection programmes often share one organisation login, or hand field staff a full platform account with more buttons than they should ever see. The collector role removes that compromise.

What a collector sees. An account with the collector role opens OrionGIS to two things: Home and OrionForms. Home says what to do in one sentence — open a form, fill it in, submit. OrionForms lists exactly the forms shared with their organisation, and each form opens to a single Open form & fill button that loads the form's fill link in the browser. Submissions save automatically.

What a collector never sees. There is no Map Studio, Data Explorer or Insights in the navigation. There is no create-form button, no drafts, no submissions table, no share-link or app-user management, no dashboards. And because the role is enforced at the access-control boundary rather than only hidden in the interface, none of those areas work even with a guessed URL: dashboard reads and the forms-management APIs answer 404 for the role.

How organisations get it. Onboarding a collector is the same client-account setup already used for department dashboards — one extra field, role: collector, on the account record. Nothing is changed for any other account; the restriction is per-account by design, never a blanket rule.

This release is the first of the Diocese of Meru Education Department's data collection programme, whose collectors now use exactly this role.