How to best do an online survey or questionnare

Interesting question.

This was asked by a client for whom I do asp.net and Classic asp updates for.

Said they were better off using an online program like Survey Monkey.

Funny enough when looking, there are quite a few programs out there.

wufoo also looks good.

So for Online Surveys or questionnaires there are three things to look for.

1. Is the audience internal or external?
2. How important is the security of the information?
3. What kind of reporting do you want from this afterwards?

Of course there are other minor items, like are there numbers? Are there lost of answeres requiring an unknown number of lines or tables rows to to generated? etc

Let's first look at the top three components and how the online and inhouse software can meet your needs.

1) If the audience is internal and the company is using Microsoft Office 2003 onwards, then the infopath tool is brilliant.
Once the audience goes external, then this becoimes a more expensive option and you would look at some online tools instead.
Noting not much comes close to the ability to add multiple lines with numbers and calcs as easily as infopath does.

2) If security is important, then that also needs to be checked and locked down. Emailing may not be the best option etc

3) Reporting always comes after and should be specified up front. What's trickier is reporting on open ending questions or multi-lined questions. This might even effect the way the questions are phrased

There you go, online surveys are go....There's lot of otehr components in successful surveys, but these three points cover the more technical aspects.

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Tom Bizannes has a Business Degree and specializes in Microsoft Office and Web Solutions (Including SharePoint).