Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office Ted Green, SharePoint Architect

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1 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office Ted Green, SharePoint Architect Te One of the most asked for features I ve heard from companies over the years is a request to have a way to support anonymous surveys in SharePoint. There is good news - Office 365 supports this ability through a free Excel app available in the public site of every Office 365 SharePoint Tennant. It s a simple tool, with very limited branding and user experience features for the non-developer types. But it does the job, right out of the gate with just a few clicks and no code. We ve created a SharePoint Effectiveness survey on our public Website using this free Excel app. We offer all participants the opportunity to benchmark their SharePoint deployment by answering 6 feature/function and 6 strategy questions. It s a high-level assessment that quickly gives the user their own SharePoint effectiveness score based on their answers, then compares their results to companies of similar size and finally to all participants to date. Feel free to get your SharePoint Effectiveness score and see the anonymous survey tool in action: One point of order as we go through the steps below; when I say this is anonymous, I m not requiring any user to log in to access this survey. The user can choose not to submit any fields that I don t require to be filled before submission. In the case you, as the site administrator or survey creator want to understand where the responses are coming PAGE 1 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

2 from, there are a variety of techniques to apply to SharePoint online that cover website analytics, but we ll cover those in a different forum. Good luck further exploring this feature. It does a really good job of serving the Anonymous Survey idea, because the Public Website on SharePoint is so locked down, the further functionality that you might want to add to this may be limited though with a little imagination, you never know where you could take this. If you take it further, please tell us about it, we d love to learn more about what you did. Steps to create the survey 1. Sign in to your public site. (To create the survey you must have permissions to create content on your companies Public Website site collection. This is the website with the address of which you may have assigned to be your site. 2. Click onto the gear icon in the ribbon and then choose Site Contents. 3. Open up the Documents link on the Site Contents page such that it opens up the Documents App PAGE 2 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

3 4. Click on the New Document link to expose the control PAGE 3 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

4 5. Select Excel survey 6. Give your new document a name, I m choosing BlogSurvey.xlsx, and then click OK. 7. The Excel Web Application will spawn and next see a blank spreadsheet don t do anything until the Edit Survey form appears over the blank spreadsheet. PAGE 4 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

5 8. From here you can customize your form by simply typing over Enter a title for your survey here and Enter a description for your survey here, additionally you can start to input your questions, and drag and drop the order they are asked in. PAGE 5 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

6 9. When you re done building your survey go ahead and click Share Survey to get the URL for the Survey. This action will also save the survey you just completed building. PAGE 6 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

7 You can use this URL anywhere you want to add Links to the Survey. 10. Click Close. 11. Now what you are left with is an Excel Web App on your screen, and note that the columns you created as survey questions are now in the first row of the table. What I like about this form, is that I can immediately see when visitors fill out my survey. Leave it open to see for yourself as you test in your environment. This is the results area after you launch your survey as well. If you ve asked the participant to provide contact information, such as an , this is where you d retrieve your results to build your graphs or respond to participants. 12. Perhaps you want to share you work with a colleague or two before you link it up on your site. Simply click the Share button above the ribbon to Share your work in a familiar SharePoint dialog box. PAGE 7 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

8 13. If you decide you want to make some changes to your survey, it s best to open the survey up in your browser and click the survey button in the ribbon. PAGE 8 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

9 14. Browse to your survey to see your work by getting the URL again, from the Share Survey drop down shown above. PAGE 9 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

10 15. Fill out your survey and submit PAGE 10 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

11 16. The Excel Web App thanks you for your response. The downside to this solution is you don t have any out of the box abilities to control what happens after the submission. The user experience pretty much ends here unless of course you want to get creative with css and jquery (as an example) such that you could plan ahead to give a different look and feel to the form, as well as a more elegant end to the experience, that perhaps sent the user back to your home page. 17. Let s go back and look at the survey results: As you can see, the second row of data is now complete with the inputs I submitted into the survey. PAGE 11 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365

12 18. And because its Excel, I can create all sorts of graphs to represent my survey results and share them with my team: For more information on SharePoint in Office 365, questions on planning the move or setting up and creating an exceptional experience, contact us: E: sales@salient6.com P: W: PAGE 12 Create an anonymous public survey for SharePoint in Office 365