Hello Lew,
Thank you for giving SP a try and for submitting you questions. I hope other will benefit from them as well. As a first attempt to answer some of your questions, please check the red lines below:
These aren't actually "surveys" in each case -- for example, we collect info from people who want to attend a seminar we're hosting -- but it looks close enough to merit serious consideration.
SP: SP is a survey and forms builder. As such it should be able to meet your needs to replace entrance or seminar forms for example.
After studying SP for few hours, I'm still unsure. However, my investigations have yielded a few questions and I would appreciate any input from folks who have a far better understanding of this project than I do.
SP: although most of your questions seem to be directed to fellow SP users I hope you don't mind trying to assist you and answer some of your questions in advance.
1. My first concern has to do with the learning curve of the project, both from the standpoint of using it as well as making modifications to suit our particular needs. Most of the help files or videos that provide an introduction are either incomplete or outdated.
SP: Your right, version wise the Youtube movies are outdated. As far as the working of features is concerned most of it is still valid. I suggest to still watch some of them to get going. E.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up9EtviM7V8 On how to create a survey will answer some of your questions.
Helpfiles are a (constant) work in progress. New pages are added per release but it's far from complete as you noticed. Focus has been on development first and keeping SP up to date to the latest technologies.
For those who are using SP, how are you conquering the learning curve?
SP: I hope fellow users will share their experiences. Trial and error and experiment as much as possible is the general advise. Not much can go wrong if you try to create demo of dummy surveys that can be removed later.
(For example, I can't even see how to develop a simple question to have the users submit their name in a text box. It looks like I'd have to set up a question, then set up an answer with text which would allow me to put a text field on the page. Surely I'm misunderstanding how to set up surveys, but I don't know how to fix my lack of understanding.)
SP: this where you can check. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up9EtviM7V8 On how to create a survey. Note: on publishing the survey dont forget to set it to active (settings)
2. In my tests, I've encountered a number of issues that look like bugs, but are probably merely the result of setup issues. I tried following the directions to a "T", but when I try to view the results, for example, I'm simply dumped out to the standard error page.
SP: in case of (potential) bugs please report them in detail either to the SP forum or submit them for repair at http://survey.codeplex.com
So my question is this: Are there people using this in production? If so, how satisfied are you with its stability?
SP: I can assure you it's being used in production, hope you will get some confirmation and feedback on the results.
3. How difficult is it to customize? And again, maybe this goes back to my lack of understanding, but I would have to re-brand the pages that the respondents see as well as the admin pages.
SP: surveys look and feel, layout and design can be completely customized and branded according to wishes through the regular SP features (no programming needed, you might need CSS knowledge).
The SP tool look and feel itself could be changed (the admin part) in which case you need to do some reprogramming, certainly of html, css and possibly aspx and C# code depending on what you intend to do. In all of these cases please take into account that on substantial changes the " new SP version" will have to published according to the open source GNU license.
Also, one of the things we'd have to do is make sure the responses go into our Oracle database.
SP: SP makes use of Mssql server. It's possible to export data (surveys, questions/ answers) etc from SP to xml, csv or otherwise. Next you could import it into an oracle database. However to make SP work with Oracle directly you would have to create an Oracle DB provider (see previous license remarkt also).
I know this sounds like a ridiculous question for various reasons, but in general, for those who are using it, how has your development experience been?
SP: so far development is mainly done through the project. Again there is not much documentation to start from (check codeplex for the basics). However the SP solution is easily set up through MS Visual Web developer express and compatible with the latest versions of asp, .net, c# etc.
It takes medior to senior level programmers to make changes or add features to the application.