App Handles Surveys for Less

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Surveys can be a useful tool for almost any company. After all, who doesnt want to know what their customers, employees and other important groups think? Survey applications and services are often so expensive, however, that they cost more than the combined mail and Web infrastructure required to manage them—small wonder that many companies have chosen not to implement a survey system.

Now, facing a growing need for the kind of information that surveys can provide but lacking the budget to implement a high-price system, many companies are starting to ask the same question: Is there an open-source solution for this business problem?

When it comes to survey software, the answer is yes. PhpESP 1.6 is an effective, capable, Web-based survey application that enables businesses to create complex and advanced surveys, view results in real time, and carry out advanced analysis. In fact, eWEEK Labs found phpESP 1.6 to be so capable that weve started to use it to handle surveys of eWEEK readers.

Like many open-source applications, phpESP is a SourceForge project and can be found at phpesp. sourceforge.net. (See related story for a look at other PHP enterprise options.) The original author of the application is James Flemer.

As the name implies, phpESP (which stands for php Easy Survey Package) is based on the PHP scripting language. Installation didnt require much more than unpacking its folders to our Web server, creating a MySQL database and making a few small configuration file changes. We were able to get it running on Linux and Windows systems with no problems.

Once phpESP is up and running, all management is done through a browser-based management interface. The product provides enough simple group and access management features that we could control the capabilities of different types of users.

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Creating a survey is essentially a five-step process that works almost like a Web-based wizard. In the first step, we entered general information such as survey title, confirmation messages and redirects (where to send people when they complete the survey—in tests, we sent them back to eWEEK.com), and the look and feel of the survey. These things can be controlled by template, and several PHP templates are provided with the application.

When it came time to create the survey questions, we had a wide variety of options, from simple yes/no to multiple choice to scales to open-ended fill-ins. We could also define whether an answer to the question was required.

Although this interface is surprisingly good for a Web-based, open-source application, it does come up short compared with the word- processor-like interface found in many commercial survey applications. Also, it took a little trial and error to get the questions just the way we wanted them.

We could then alter the order of our questions and add page breaks between questions if we so desired, preview the survey in our browser, and finish the survey. Completed surveys can be delivered as stand-alone Web pages or can be embedded in existing Web pages through a small amount of PHP code.

Once a survey is completed, phpESP makes it possible to test the survey and view results without making the survey live. After testing, we could activate the survey to deliver it to respondents.

One annoyance in phpESP was that it was impossible to go back and edit a survey once it had been clicked as finished. To make changes at this point, we had to create a copy of the original survey and edit that. This also made it difficult for two people to collaborate on creating a survey.

Still, while we found some of the interface quirks annoying—especially when compared with the user-friendly interfaces in survey products such as Catapult Systems Corp.s Inquisite and Perseus Development Corp.s SurveySolutions XP—none were particularly problematic. In fact, the eWEEK editor who is using phpESP to create surveys mastered the interface in very little time.

We would like the option to create e-mail-only surveys as well as the Web-based variety, but even commercial products such as Inquisite dont provide this capability.

In addition to Testing and Active, survey status can be defined as End, when responses are no longer being taken, and Archive, when it is stored in the database but easy access to results is no longer available. We would have liked the option of simply deleting a survey, especially when it was one that we had copied to edit.

PhpESP provides a good amount of results analysis, even letting us view results as they arrived in real time. We could choose to view the results of all respondents or drill down to individual responses. Results from multiple surveys can be cross-tabulated to view trends, and results can also be exported as comma-delimited text for use in Excel and other analysis tools.

PhpESP held up well performancewise, handling close to 1,000 responses in the span of a few hours while running on a fairly modest Intel Corp. Pentium III system with the open-source Apache browser.

East Coast Technical Director Jim Rapoza can be reached at jim_rapoza@ziffdavis.com.