InformationWeek

September 8, 1997

Surveys Via The Net

EZSurvey lets users use Web for studies

oftware used by companies to survey their employees has moved to corporate intranets and even the public Internet. Raosoft Inc. last week began shipping EZSurvey 1.0, which lets a company create a survey and conduct it over the World Wide Web.

The Seattle company's older software, SurveyWin 3.2, relies on E-mail systems-including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus' cc:Mail and Notes-to conduct the surveys. Users of EZSurvey will still need SurveyWin because it contains the tools needed to analyze the survey data. EZSurvey is priced at $399, while SurveyWin costs $495.

Bill Moore, a manager in the computer assurances division of Coopers & Lybrand in San Francisco, uses EZSurv ey to help big companies design and administer polls to evaluate the efficiency of their IT departments. One company he declines to name, for example, recently polled its employees and concluded that it was spending too much on hardware and not enough on support personnel. Within two weeks, he says, the company had hired more staff and started buying cheaper PCs.

Moore had used Raosoft's older software but wasn't pleased with the results. "We had some problems with it," he says. "It was very powerful, but I didn't need the power of its analysis. I needed more robust distribution." A review of other survey packages didn't produce a satisfactory product, because most were developed for "hard-core statisticians" and included regression tools that are beyond what most companies want when taking the pulse of their employees, he says.

In the end, Moore says, he convinced Raosoft of the need to use the Web as a delivery mechanism since many enterprises have subsidiaries that were acquired and are using diffe rent E-mail systems.

Another Raosoft customer, the Social Security Administration, uses the E-mail version to present questions regarding staff training and software releases to a representative sample of 10,000 claims officers in its field offices. But the agency will stick with E-mail distribution for now because not all of its employees have intranet access.

Back to News in Review