Transcript LimeSurvey

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LimeSurvey
a quick & dirty overview
Dennis Little Technology Management Partners
DennisLittle.com
Dennis Little
KeyCruncher.com – slides available
9 years experience integrating open
source and COTS for SMB & Fortune 500
my niche: Technology Translator
typically use RedHat/variants or Ubuntu
Shameless plug: Dering Consulting Group,
Management Consulting & Surveys
LimeSurvey Overview
Founded Feb. 2003 as PHPSurveyor
Release v1.80 today
v2 in active development
AJAX interface
CakePHP framework
Goals:
More modular
GUI accessibility
LimeSurvey Requirements
v1.8
~40MB disk space
Database:
MySQL 4.1+
MS SQL 2000+
Postgres 7+
PHP 4.3.2+
Requirements continued…
PHP modules / libraries:
mbstring (localizations)
mysql4 or mysql5 PHP library (standard)
sessions support (standard)
pcre (regular expressions support – standard)
Optional:
iconv extension library on PHP4 (Excel compat)
GD-library (captchas / charts)
LDAP-library (tokens based on LDAP)
How I use LimeSurvey
Client satisfaction surveys
Prospecting new clients / services
Management consulting:
Commonwealth of PA:
DPW, DOT, Dept of Aging, Gov. Budget Office
Chambers of Commerce – member surveys
Gannett Fleming
Harrisburg Young Professionals
Shared LAMP VPS: FC8, 256RAM
Others using LimeSurvey
2004 presidential election – Verified Voting
Foundation
Austrian state government
Ubuntu – community survey
GNOME project – internal survey
Viability
SourceForge ranking of 106 today
(activity)
Won 1st prize Business Mgmt category @
2007 Trophees du Libre international
LimeSurvey Features
Unlimited surveys, questions, participants
Multi-lingual – 50 languages front/back
20 question types
Branching / skip logic
Assessment surveys / dynamic feedback
Reusable answer / label sets
Anonymous / tracked surveys
LimeSurvey Features…
WYSIWYG HTML edits (bold, italics, links)
Saved survey, continue later
Cookie or session based surveys
Templates for survey look & feel
Back-office data entry support (paper)
Expiration of surveys
Import/export CSV, SPSS, Excel
User management / one-time use tokens
LimeSurvey Features…
Quotas - only accept so many responses
Free, open source software
GPL license v2 or later
Run for any purpose
Modify for any reason
Redistribute copies w/ source & mods
Improve & re-release w/ source & mods
You own the data!
Limitations
Branching does not support an “OR” of
multiple questions, only “AND” between
questions (v1.7.2)
Emails are text-only (helps with SPAM
filtering) and can not include attachments
LimeSurvey Question Types
LimeSurvey web site
Anecdotal Best Practices
Notify participants of upcoming survey
Convey participant’s importance to
success
Communicate purpose of survey
Assure confidentiality
Neutral party encourages candor
Anecdotal Best Practices
Answer: How long will this take?
Remind prospects to participate
Confirm receipt
Follow-up
Clearly defined deadline to participate w/
fairly short window
Days of the week you send invites,
reminders matters
Demo Sample Survey?
Sample survey
Deployment
Download tgz
Unpack
Edit config.php
chmod directories (templates, upload,
images)
Run installer to create database
Delete installer (forced)
Login to admin console
config.php
Dennis Little
KeyCruncher.com - slides download
Questions? CPLUG mailing list