Our business is analyzing data, not collecting it.

However we have done a lot of work on evaluating methods of collecting data over the web and came across InfoPath (InfoPath “12” is Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007) not so long ago, and I thought it worth a mention – also because a while back we developed a question bank called “WorkGauge” for employee satisfaction surveys.

This is not a review. I may even have an eval copy on one of the CDs that Microsoft sends me, but I haven’t installed it (and won’t until I have the need and a clean machine).

So, why mention it?

Because it may, just may, be a solution for organizations wanting to do internal surveys .. and I don’t think it is generally known about.

This is a complete Microsoft solution. Your organization needs to be running Outlook and Office as standard (I am unsure what minimum versions will suffice), but it seems as if that may suffice (although SharePoint seems to get in there somewhere). So, all your survey recipients need Outlook, obviously not something you can guarantee in a wider context but may be OK for in-house work (version compatibility being an issue to be resolved).

At first blush, it seemed like a low-tech (as in good!) solution from Microsoft, but then again I was not encouraged to read on infopathdev.com “Developing successful InfoPath forms requires skills in numerous technologies such as SharePoint, SQL, Access, Web Services, XSLT, XPath, C#.NET, VB.NET, JavaScript, VBScript, XML, XML Schema, etc.”. Well, we shall see.

The data from the collected emails then ends up in Excel so, while that is not an ideal analysis environment, at least we can export reasonably easily. I would be interested in seeing how they store the answers to multiple response questions.

OK, some resources

Gathering Scads of Info with InfoPath

Using InfoPath Email forms

Or TudorT’s blog

Infopath development resources

InfoPath Developer Portal

InfoPath 2003 Product Information (includes pricing and trial versions)

Creating a web service for an InfoPath form in 25 easy steps

If have experience with InfoPath, or an interest in it, I’d be pleased to hear from you.