For a long time, we've used SurveyMonkey.com to create simple online questionnaires. But from the beginning there was one gotcha that always bugged me... SurveyMonkey.com does not offer any means of notification--no e-mail, no RSS, no API, nothing. As a results, we were continually logging into SurveyMonkey.com to see if we had any new submissions. Well, a couple weeks ago, we went a few days without checking and, as Murphy would suggest, we failed to notice a new RSS feed order for a few days. That was the straw the broke the camel's back. I went looking for an alternative solution--and I found a great one in Google Docs spreadsheets. As it turns out, its is very easy to create a web form to that captures results into a Google Docs spreadsheet. And since Google Docs provides a flexible mechanism for e-mail notification, sharing access with other users, online backup, access to data in multiple formats, this turned out to be a much better solution than SurveyMonkey.com. So, with very little effort, I replaced the MyST Enterprise RSS Setup Questionnaire with a form that feeds into a secure Google Docs spreadsheet. Now, the right folks within MyST get e-mail notification the moment a new submission occurs. If you're looking for an easy-to-use form capture mechanism, take a look at Google Docs spreadsheets.
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