Introduction

Forsta SmartHub is a centralized hub for organizing your research programs, for administration and data management of all the different assets used in the program, like surveys, contact databases, panels, reports and end users. It allows multiple data sets of different types to be brought together, relationships defined, and data readied for use in dashboards, analysis, reports, action management, and other areas.

Data that is brought into SmartHub is loaded to a reporting database, the SmartHub Mart, which is used for reporting and analysis in Forsta Plus. The SmartHub Mart provides very fast query support, especially for ad-hoc queries on large data sets.

Note: SmartHub requires MS SQL Server Enterprise Edition, so On-Premise clients who wish to use SmartHub must have Enterprise Edition installed.

SmartHub offers good support for analytics and reporting on VoC, VoE and MR programs:

• Personalized interactive dashboards

• Hierarchies, drill-down

• Ad-hoc reporting: Top-line and banner reports.

• Data discovery.

• Advanced analytics

• Joining data across many data ets. One-to-many relations.

Forsta SmartHub supports the following data:

• Surveys.

• Contact Databases.

• Standard Panels/Professional Panels.

• Custom data (data tables)

SmartHub does not support:

• Basic Panels.

• Test databases.

Note: The hub creation/editing facility is only available by Professional Users with the appropriate permission.

To use a hub when creating reports in Studio, Reportal or Discovery Analytics, the report designer must have at least view permission to the hub (Hub Permissions).

How Smarthub Works

Data is moved continuously from surveys and other data sources over to a separate database (the SmartHub Mart) for reporting and analytics. SmartHub supports continuous updates of data and the ability to set a recurrence pattern (for example daily). For continuous updates, data sources will be checked for changes and updates once every five minutes, and will initiate a load task if any changes are registered. Changes that will trigger a load include changes in data (new records, removed records, updated records) and meta data/survey definition (relaunch). If no changes are registered, then no task is initiated Show me.

Encryption

For companies that have the “Database Encryption” add-on, the entire hub database will be encrypted if the company has enforced DB encryption set to apply for all projects. If not, the hub database will not be encrypted.

Storage Cost

For Forsta SaaS clients, SmartHub is offered at no additional cost for up to 10 GB of data. For larger data volumes, additional costs apply. Details of storage consumption will be included in the monthly reports.

For Forsta On Premise clients, SmartHub is offered at no additional cost, regardless of storage consumption.

You can view the current storage usage in the Settings > Storage usage menu.

The storage consumption for a survey will vary based on the number of variables and records in the data set, the type of variables and the length of the values stored. Open text questions with long answers will lead to significantly higher storage than other variables.

Below are some real examples:

Description	Size of storage
Survey with 530 variables and 380 000 records	1.5 GB
Survey with 200 fields and 86 500 records	270 MB
Survey with 45 fields and 51 000 records	146 MB
Survey with 103 fields and 21 600 records	120 MB
Survey with 1082 fields and 300 000 records	97 MB
Survey with 166 fields and 46 000 records	61 MB
Survey with 76 fields, 1000 records	<1 MB