Web-based surveys redux

[Jerry Kuntz]

The topic of web-based surveys has come up a few times on Web4Lib over the years, but it seems like it's been a while since it was revisted...

We're outgrowing the cgi script we've been using, Big Bird Nose Survey (http://bignosebird.com/carchive/survey.shtml), and need something a little more robust: supporting multi-page forms, and either direct logging into a database file or at least logging to a comma-delimited file. We also want to run surveys on a frequent basis, so we're not really considering any survey-hosting services--we want to host it ourselves. And I'm not sure we should be going in the direction of customizing scripts, which involves some pretty labor-intensive programming. We're running Apache for Windows and do have perl loaded, but not PHP or mySQL yet. I don't think we're ready to go whole hog with ColdFusion or Zope (but you can try to convince me!).

Of commercial products, some big names appear to be java-based Survey Said (http://www.surveysaid.com/ ; cgi-based EZSurvey (http://www.raosoft.com/products/ezsurvey/); IIS-based Active Survey (http://www.activewebsurvey.com/WEBSURVEY4/sourcecode.asp); IIS-based Perseus Survey Solutions (http://www.perseusdevelopment.com/softwareprod/sspro/professional.html); and IIS-based Survey System (http://www.surveysystem.com/websurveys.htm).

Anyone want to suggest a direction? Should we bite the bullet and look at an application server? Anyone happy with any of the above commercial products (particularly EZSurvey)? Know about any open-source or free scripts that aren't so tortuous to revise? 




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Jerry Kuntz
Electronic Resources Consultant
Ramapo Catskill Library System
jkuntz at rcls.org

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