Share Point Survey Capabilities/Limitations

[Patricia Pavone]

I am a technical human resource specialist and I am looking at SharePoint's
survey capability as a possible replacement for Survey Monkey. We would be
using it for job analysis surveys which can be very long... often hundreds of
questions. Based on what I have seen so far, it seems like SharePoint's
survey functionality may not be robust enough. Has anyone used it for
lengthy or complex surveys? If so, how has it performed? I would be
especially interested in any comparisons between Survey Monkey and SharePoint.
--
PP

[Rob Schneider]

Patricia

SharePoint's survey function (an application delivered with SharePoint)
is robust. Far as I know, it doesn't fail and will work. Robustness is
not an issue.

However, it's functionality is not as rich as Survey Monkey. Survey
Monkey was built specifically to do surveys and the success of the
company depended on it. Hence they do all they can do do what is
needed. In SharePoint, it's a great application for sophisticated
questionnaires with lots of features; but it only does what it does. I
suspect it there only to demonstrate the possibilities for developers.

The SharePoint survey application is relatively simple but it is
sophisticated enough to be really useful. But my hunch is you'll
probably find that it has too many compromises especially related to
getting results exported out.

Full disclosure: I don't have any experience doing questionnaires of
hundreds of questions. First, I doubt I would try it period as who wants
to answer such questionaires. Sounds more like a tax return!! Second, I
surely wouldn't do it in SharePoint and maybe not Survey Monkey.

--rms

[LoriH]

Patricia,
I am, as we speak, working on a rather long questionnaire for potential site
collection owners. It's not horribly complicated, but it's not overly simple,
either.

Here are a couple of drawbacks I've encountered with the SharePoint Survey.

1. Users cannot go back a page if they want to change an answer to a
question. They get stuck in a do-loop of errors that will not allow them to
save. They'll have to go back and start over.
2. If a user wants to change a response, they have to click through all of
the pages and pages of responses they've already submitted to find the one
that they want to change and then click through all the pages to get to the
end to submit it.
3. The Next | Save | Cancel button choices give the user the impression that
if they click 'Save' they are done. You're not done until you click 'Finish'
at the end.
4. The branching logic can get somewhat complicated - however, please take
that with a grain of salt because I don't design surveys for a living. That
said, I had issues with the branching logic skipping entire sections when I
expected it to go to the next question in the list, and I there is only one
branch option for multi-line text responses. I may have a list of
sub-questions, and it would seem logical to me to be able to add those
additional branches, but OOB you can't.
5. When re-ordering questions for a very long survey, you're going to have
to do it in small-ish time increments, as it will time out by the time you
get to the end and then you've got to start over because there isn't an
incremental save for SharePoint lists, which is what the survey really is. My
survey is 55 questions long and we were re-ordering the sections to give you
an idea of what the timeframe might be like.
6. SharePoint Survey has no question or page numbering feature. Nor does it
have a progress bar, or the capability to change the button labels as you can
in Survey Monkey.
7. Survey Monkey also gives you some additional question formats such as
matrices. The only thing that comes close in SharePoint Survey is the rating
scale.
8. Back to SharePoint Survey, there is no way to export the questions to
Excel natively. Nor could I find a way to connect my survey to InfoPath so I
could edit the questions there. Again, take that with a grain of salt because
I haven't worked in it long enough to know whether it's a real limitation or
not.
9. There isn't a good way to export the results out of SharePoint, either.
In another post in this list, there was an issue with the number of responses
that can be exported out of the survey, which is apparently 100. If it has
this limit for exporting responses, I'd have to guess that there is an upper
limit for the number of questions it will allow you to have as well. I can't
speak to what that might be because my survey currently has about 55
questions.

Hope this helps...
Lori

[LoriH]

One more... users can't see or print the full survey to review it before
completing it online.