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What Your Co-Workers Really Think - SharePoint and Surveys

Published Thursday, August 28, 2008 by bloggerblognet84084 | E-mail this post

Have you ever had to run around the office to get consensus from the team on what to do? Or perhaps what to order for Friday's lunch? Or where to go for the staff Christmas party? I have. It's... well...painful.

So the other day I was poking around our hosted SharePoint site that we use for document management and everyone has access to, to find it has a surveys feature! If only I knew about this before, I could have saved myself a lot of time.

So what's really great, is it not only allows you to set up single question surveys, but accommodates more complicated surveys, where the results of the first question may change the questions you ask after it. SP calls this Branching Logic.

Additional features, allow you to control whether or not you allow your responders to fill in the survey more than once. For extensive surveys, you can also allow some responses to remain blank, while others may be a required field. Required fields can be great, especially if you are trying to obtain information such as a geographical location (by using a Zip Code field.)

Setting up a survey in SharePoint is fairly straight forward. When you wish to include Branching logic, it gets a little more complicated, but not by much.

When you create your Survey, click on Site Actions. Next click the "Create" option, and in the Create page, under "Tracking" select Survey. Once you have created its name, description, and selected navigation options, there are two important questions:

Show user names in survey results? Selecting "No" protects respondents' anonymity.
Allow multiple responses? Selecting "No" ensures that there is no ballot stuffing.

The next Sharepoint screen allows you to enter your first question. Once all of your selections have been made, if this is a one question survey, you can simply select Finish. However if it is a multiple question survey and may be using Branching logic, simply select Next Question, and continue entering all of the necessary questions.

If you're looking to use Branching logic, it is applied once all of the questions have been answered. To do so, navigate to the settings page for the survey, and select the first question where the branching is to take place. The Edit Question page has changed, to allow for branching information to be applied to the question.

Now you will not have to wander the office halls in the attempt to gain a consensus on whether you should have pizza or salad for Friday's meeting!

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