Survey tool with outlook
Sometime back my HR had a requirement where she wanted to know how many of the employees in the unit are MCP, MCSD etc certified and she wanted to send a survey mailer using outlook for the same. The closest out of box option i could find with Outlook was the 'Voting buttons'. But that had the limitation that a user can select only one option. And also that if the users’ replies to same vote more than once, the latest gets updated erasing the earlier votes. To solve this i wrote a small VBA app that can capture all the voting results and generate it's own reports, instead of using the default voting results.
However, few days back i had another requirement to collect the feedback on the Technology Community Program that's happening inside the Corporate and i thought i need to use the same app again. But realized that it was not possible as the questions were more detailed and were not mere voting options. Before i could write my own app for that i found the MAPI Lab’s easy Survey tool, one of the MAPILab add-ins for MS Outlook.
This tool uses MS Access at the background to collect data and generate reports. And the survey is sent as web page to all users using outlook. All we need to do is to create our survey questions as columns in a table in MS Access. And then use the Access Forms designer to create a corresponding HTML page out of the table with the required checkboxes, radio button etc. It’s a must that the form has a submit button with the name as ‘Submit’ as the survey tool interprets the survey results based on the submit button. The created HTML page can be sent as mail surveys using Outlook. The survey results are again processed from outlook inbox and are stored in MS Access table.
I found this handy for my use. However my survey question was relatively simple and short. But if you have a complex survey or verbose questions then you would definitely need some table designing skills and forms designing skills as well so that you have the right columns and forms created. This is a sponsered post of my independent views