The Autolaunch function allows you to integrate Enalyzer with your other systems, so as to continuously send out e-mail invitations automatically fed from these systems.
This is especially useful in transaction-based and "never ending" surveys. This could be a course evaluation where staff regularly participate in a course - week after week - where you want to launch the same schedule every week for new course participants. Rather than launching manually it's possible to automate this process.
The Autolaunch feature only works when you have launched a project. The feature technically works as a re-launch - by adding new respondents to an existing project.
Background variables as hidden questions
When you setup a survey to use the Autolaunch function it's important that you create a hidden question for each background variable before you setup the Autolaunch function.
It's necessary that you do this if you want to add additional background information about your respondents, e.g. department, country etc. The hidden questions must be placed at the beginning of the survey and they need to be created as text field questions. Click here for a step by step guide.
How do you use the Autolaunch procedure?
After doing an e-mail launch, go to the Auto functions menu, under the Launch tab, and select the Autolaunch button. A new window will open.
Choose Launch: In the drop down menu select the launch you will do an autolaunch to.
Status: To turn on the system, set the status to Enabled.
Test: Here you can test the settings.
There are four tabs, Scheduling, Import Method, Notifications and Log.
Scheduling: Here you can specify when and how often to launch. The frequency can be set to: once, monthly, daily, every weekday or once a week.
Import Method: Here you can choose between two import methods, FTP and HTTP. You will have to get a hold of your IT department to get it working.
Notifications: Enter an e-mail address where notifications will be sent to, such as error occurring. You can type in multiple email addresses - just separate them with semicolons.
Notice: If you tick off Send on failure only you will only receive a notification e-mail if the function fails to send out invitations
Log: This is your log where you can follow the auto launches.
Description for your IT department
A FTP or web server that is exposed to the internet is required. For Autolaunch it is suggested to make a read/only account and a long username and password. Do not expose any other company files on this account. You should overwrite the file that is specified in the Autolaunch matching the schedule.
Suggestion: Make a script that is executed by Windows Scheduled Tasks. The script can extract data from whatever system, put it into a flat .csv file and place it in the location exposed by your FTP or web server. The Autolaunch has a safety feature to ensure that respondents don't receive multiple invitations if the file wasn't overwritten. This is done by storing a hash value of the content of the file. The hash value of the file that is picked up is always checked against the last.
The log will show an entry stating that nothing was done because the file was identical to the last. The format of the .csv file is described in the manual/online help under Import (it's the same format that is used for manual imports).
Tip: Get feedback back into your systems with Autoexport - It works the same way by sending data back flat files via FTP or E-mail.
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