Technet Magazine Article on Sharepoint Survey Infrastructure
The February 2008 issue of Microsoft’s Technet Magazine has a feature article called “Building a Powerful Survey Infrastructure.” Unfortunately, this shows that Microsoft’s survey solution has a long way to go.
The article, which starts out by touting the necessity of surveys as part of corporate infrastructure, covers a bevy of different Microsoft products that should supposedly work in unison to create the “powerful survey infrastructure” that the article gets its name from.
Included in this are MOSS 2007 (aka Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007), WSS (Windows SharePoint Services), and Infopath. In reality though, these are not off the shelf products that can be installed/configured into the final solution. These are components, not finished products, thus requiring your IT department, web team, and/or software developers to “mash” these pieces into something that is actually functional and usable for business users.
Realistically, that’s not a simple task. It’s going to take a lot of time and money — and even the end solution that the author discusses requires a sophisticated user to utilize all of the system’s functionality (”survey designers must be aware of postback issues…”).
Our product, Checkbox, on the other hand, can replace a good portion of the components that the author discusses. Surveys can be created by technically proficient users as well as those who are not (with a light amount of training). Plus, an off the shelf Microsoft based system can still, in most cases, integrated with SharePoint infrastructure if needed.
