Using Sharepoint Survey functionality to create basic web forms

The OOB MOSS 2007 Survey building functionality enables quick and easy to creation of nicely formatted web forms that might appear on an intranet or web site. The Survey approach does however have some shortcomings when wanting to process / view the data submitted.

A simple feedback form created using Sharepoint Survey functionality

For most forms we will not want a user to be able to view other peoples responses. Permissions must therefore be set to prevent users viewing and editing other peoples responses.
Settings > Survey Settings > Advanced Settings

To enable users to respond the survey you must give them contribute rights, e.g. give the ‘Sitename Visitors’ group permissions to the survey by going to:
Settings > Survey Settings > Permissions for this survey > Actions > Edit Permissions.

You will be prompted if you want to break inheritance, click ‘OK’.

Tick the checkbox next to the group you want to be able to respond to the survey and go to Actions > Edit User Permissions. Give them contribute rights. They won’t be able to delete other users responses if you have set the surveys advanced settings as above.

To enable the survey administrator to view all responses to a survey you must edit the survey permissions and give them either ‘Design’ or ‘Full Control’ permissions to the survey.

Triggering email from Sharepoint Survey responses

Ideally when the survey form was submitted it would trigger an email to the form owner.

Alert Me

The ‘Alert Me’ function of the Survey list cannot be used because the survey permissions have been set to only allow users to view their own responses.

The resulting error message:

Error message when try to enable an alert on a survey when users can only view their own responses

Workflows

Workflows cannot be created that are started when someone responds to a survey,  see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926370 for more information.

Because of these shortcoming it would would mean that someone would have to monitor the survey by visiting the Survey to the survey page every day to check for new responses. This is not an ideal situation.

Should you use MOSS surveys for creating web forms?

To summarise there are pros and cons of using Sharepoint Surveys for quick and easy creation of web forms.
Advantages

• Can remove burden from development team by enabling survey administrator to maintain question list.
• Fast form building with common .NET functionality such as required fields and more advanced functionality such as branching.
• Responses can easily be exported to spreadsheet functionality built in for use in reporting / backup / movement of data.
• Authentication – users are already authenticated (if not using anonymous access on site), no need to reauthenticate.

Disadvantages

• Cannot create an alert me when users can only view their own response
• Cannot use workflow to trigger email to the survey administrator on a survey response.
• Default navigation will link to the survey ‘homepage’ which is not the survey response page. To get round this a direct link to the response form could be added to the navigation.

References

• WebGurus Blog – Cannot start a workflow from a survey response in MOSS 2007
• SADev – Sharepoint Survey Permissions 1