iSalient, AJAX-Based Hosted Survey Solution
Sponsored Post: Many online Survey applications are available on the web as hosted or downloadable package that you can run on your own server. iSalient is a hosted Survey solution which provides the complete package to create advanced forms for collecting data, and usually I use three criteria to evaluate such online services:
- The system flexibility and its capabilities to create advanced and customized forms
- Statistics options and features to retrieve results
- Pricing (Of course)
You can be easily satisfied with the two first criteria while talking about hosted surveys for the number of features that they offer, especially for students or researchers looking for a ready to use solution with nothing to install or configure. iSalient aims to provide the solution for those and others and I think it's worth a trial to see its capabilities.
iSalient have an AJAX interface to create and customize your survey on the fly, intuitive and very easy to use powered by prototype and scriptaculous. There is many options available to create survey general, look and feel, number of response, start and end date, language, status ... and more advanced options such for restricted surveys, navigation ... etc. Questions are easy to create, simply by choosing from the different options available in the drop down menu (18 options available), you can create from simple true false questions to advanced option with sliders, then you can add conditions and your survey is ready to go.
After creating your survey you can deploy it and start instantly collecting data and viewing results. iSalient uses flash to show very nice looking graphs, but I didn't find option to export data. This could be a limitation if you need to use survey results to process it with external software.
More than surveys, iSalient offer a solution to email list management and respondents. This will provide you the possibility to create and organize a database of respondents that you can use it during survey distribution. It's limited to 500 subscribers per list, but I don't see it a limitation.
Finally iSalient have many useful templates that you can use to create your surveys, from the menu Surveys and then import. But here I was surprised to meet the first bug "SELECT id FROM survey_surveys WHERE admin_id = 1501 AND id= LIMIT 1", probably I did not have enough permissions or something, but I wasn't looking to learn SQL syntaxes anyway. The import feature is available for styles also, but I was thrilled to try it.
Overall the solution is very complete, from management of surveys to emails, the look and feel of the application. Pricing goes from $8.95 per month, and bugs could be easily fixed that's what web developers are useful for! But it is better for production application to adopt a more personalized error reporting and keep it silent like "An SQL error occurred."
For more information http://www.isalient.com/
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