I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in.  Overall the plugin worked well.  Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:

The main issue was a problem in the table that holds the responses.  The field that stores the user answer is limited to 255 characters, but no limit is enforced on the form.  And when users are invited to submit free form comments they quickly exceed the 255 limit.  The result is that a number of the responses were cut off in the database, and some of the user response was lost.  Not the nicest thing to realize after the fact, but luckily the fix is easy.

To make the alteration change open the plugin’s surveys.php  file and find the create table section.  Right around line 101 you’ll see the code that creates the surveys_result_answer table.  Alter the ‘user_answer’ column to use the blob data type — you’ll see it is set to a text(255) type, which is too short for many users.

CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->prefix}surveys_result_answer ((
`ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`result_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`answer_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`question_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`user_answer` blob NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`ID`),
KEY `question_ID` (`question_ID`),
KEY `answer_ID` (`answer_ID`),
KEY `result_ID` (`result_ID`)
) ;

This small change fixes that problem.  The only other note is we used this tool on a members-only site.  I’d want to give it a thorough security check before using this on a public site.  I did note the user-text was escaped, so it looks like some protections are in place.  But these days you can never be too security conscious.

Surveys < Plugins < WordPress < Tools < Bin-Co

Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. The user who take the survey can enter their details at the end of the survey – or leave it as an anonymous result.

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy.  And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs.  I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want.  These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point.  When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here.  And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.

The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys.  The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.

WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins

The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.

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Jay Collier at Bates ponders the strengths of Drupal and WordPress MU.  In my experience WordPress is quicker to get going with, and for most web sites it can rise to most any challenge.  And it is the king of multi-site installations.  Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but can better support needs such as a work flow-content approval path, or something less traditional, like a content repository system.  In meeting a business need the technology is normally the least important element — what are your goals, who is the audience, what do they need, etc. — those are the important questions.  Once you have those answers you go looking for a technology.  My advice?  Look at WordPress first — if it doesn’t do what you want, in a quick straightforward way, keep looking.  But in my experience that won’t happen very often.

Evaluating Drupal and Wordpress MU | Bates Web Communications

As part of our new Web Hub program — and in previous discovery projects (2008 | 2007) — I’ve been evaluating open-source content management software. Our two finalists are Drupal and Wordpress MU.

Displaying enterprise data — such as course listings and directory information — has been the greatest challenge in site architecture prototyping. Both software packages provide support for collections of
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Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat.   Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive.  Teambox organizes communication around projects.  Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files.  The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar.  And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data.  And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails).  Now I just need a project to test it with…

Community: Teambox is a public open-source project.
Installing:If you want to run your own server with Teambox, some knowledge of Ruby on Rails and UNIX is very recommended.

Blog Archive » The quiet majority in collaborative communities

Message traffic on our company Yammer network is following the classic 80-20 principle, although in our case it is closer to 85-15.

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Some public agencies understand that their data is our data — some public, or quasi-public agencies has taken a different tack.  The New York Mass Transit Authority at one point maintained that transit schedules were copyrighted — nice to see they’ve come to a more reasonable attitude.  Whatever their misgivings, this will make their service, and customer relations/communication better.

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I attended an Apple sponsored presentation yesterday on using the Xcode IDE to build iPhone and iTouch apps.  It was a very well done presentation, and had me almost ready to rush out and buy a Macbook and iTouch to get started building cool apps — certainly easy to see why Apple App building has become such a popular past time (and big money maker for Apple).

Real ‘Apps’ run native on the phone, and utilize Interface Building and the objective-C language.  Web apps (small ‘a’) are built with the iPhone/touch in mind using HTML 5 and javascript, made easy through the use of the Dashcode program.  The advantage here is the site you build is also accessible to non-iPhone devices, especially if they are running Safari.  In a business setting it will be hard to convince me that developing for the proprietary and closed iPhone environment makes much sense. Sites like m.mit.edu show how far a web standards approach can go towards providing a rich mobile experience — and backing an open platform accessible on many types of devices will pay off much better in the long term.

Sorry to say I have resisted the urge to grab a new Macbook.  But probably my biggest take-away is how much can be done with structured XML.   One of the two Dashcode examples in the presentation utilized the raw XML feed from the Apple Quicktime Movie Trailer site. Literally in 5 minutes the presenter had a very cool web app running on his iPhone just using the XML and the features in Dashcode.  I have been talking about the power of XML for a while, but still haven’t drummed up much interest here on campus in making internal data sets available as structured XML.  Maybe a quick slight of hand with a custom iPhone app can help show how useful this idea would really be.  Maybe a little of the Apple magic will rub off…

Download Xcode – Apple Developer Connection

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What features are needed in a workplace social network system?  And could BuddyPress, the WordPress multi-user collection of social networking plug-ins, be used to power it?  Yammer uses has recently taken off at my workplace, and its success here is serving as a real example of the types of communication and collaboration people are looking for in the workplace.  Here are a couple of thoughts, observations and opinions:

• Follow vs. Friends — In the workplace the ability to follow people without the expectation of reciprocity is important — more like twitter, less like Facebook — the default BuddyPress behavior is to friend.
• Discussion — neither Twitter or Yammer is very good for a discussion, especially with multiple people.  A forum-type tool would be useful for this.
• Share multiple types of content — newsletters, department updates, external news items.
• List upcoming events — send invitations — track attendance
• Private messaging is needed
• Activity notices need to send alerts via email
• One view that tracks all activity of followed accounts, with easy reply/comment links.
• Availability of desktop client (like TweetDesk for Twitter/Facebook)
• Site wide auto tagging, based on a pre-set list of keywords, for all content types — would not require users to remember to tag, and would insure that keywords important to employees are useful for finding content.

The BuddyPress system provides forums, blogs, groups, private messaging, and a live-blogging feature called the wire that is similar to twitter — so it has the capabilities to address most of the listed items.   It might just be possible to create a social network system for our staff that combines the best features of micro-blogging a-la twitter/yammer, blogs, newsletters, and forums.  Not everything is perfect — for instance the two-way friending used needs to be shifted to a one sided following.  And the basic site wide activity widget needs to offer integrated reply boxes, similar to what you get with a tool like Yammer.  But having our own system would offer the added benefits of integration with our central user authentication service (single sign-on), an auto keyword system specific to our needs, and a system where we own and control the content.  And BuddyPress/WordPress MU offers a system with low annual cost, readily customized, and a strong user community.

Communication Inventory

Collaboration — 2 way

• Arrange meetings
• Synchronous discussion
• Asynchronous discussion
• Synchronous casual conversation
• Asynchronous casual conversation
• Help answer questions
• Create/edit documents
• Access, review and present data
• Party invitations
• organize training
• develop best practices
• Mentor

Announce – 1 way outgoing

• Give lectures
• Notify of problems
• Publish news
• Advertise events
• Distribute personal contact information
• Report on personal skills/experience inventory

Research — 1 way incoming

• Read archived discussions
• Search keywords
• Seek reference materials
• Read news
• Reference help, technical standards documents
• Reference best practices
• Review meeting notes
• Find people with certain skills/experience

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Today’s New York Times has an article on what programmers are doing with government data — it is great to see the value creativity can create out of something as mundane as reams of government data.  StumbleSafely suggests safe routes home for DC residents based on crime statistics — Routesy is an iPhone app for transit schedules in San Francisco.  Much of this data has been available publicly for years, but not in a format that was readily accessed.  But services like DataSF and Data.gov are changing that, and opening the door for creativity.  What about in your company?  Is it easy to get at various data sets, or are they locked up behind proprietary and departmental walls?  Unfortunately all too often I see more of the latter than the former.   Technology isn’t the problem here — making data should not require a lot of technical work.  What it takes is a committment to the process, and trust in the benefits of openness over the tradition of hording information.  Information = power?  How about openness = innovation?  And builds value many times more valuable than the old way.

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In the theory of limited time and resources, if people do more of one thing then they do less of something else.  So if Twitter is growing, what is losing out?  Are Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, etc. competitors, or do they complement each other?  I have accounts on all these services, and for me they complement each other nicely:

• Twitter – perfect for sharing random thoughts with a wide group of friends and collegues — auto-posts to my Facebook and LinkedIN status and with the #yam hashtag to my Yammer account. Use TweetDesk for both Twitter and Facebook.
• WordPress — good for longer, more thoughtful stuff, which I’ll want to refer back to.  Post update notices automatically go to Twitter (which then re-distributes to the other channels as listed above.)
• Facebook — for communication/discussion with family and friends — rarely update status directly, letting Twitter feed do the work for me.
• LinkedIn — not as active a channel as I’d like, but still a good source for keeping up with work-related/professional colleagues — the group conversations, especially the WordPress group are great – get updates via email.
• Yammer — only been using it for a month for internal Yale networking, but proving to be quite useful.  Normally post directly, but sometimes feed posts from Twitter.

You’ll note a big theme here is the cross-posting between the channels.  So while it might seem like a lot to monitor at first,  TweetDesk and email keep me notified and connected pretty easily.

And what suffers?  In my household the television is rarely on.  And in recent months my email volume has dropped significantly — at least for real communication (not counting spam.)  And I don’t play phone tag very much.

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These days, with regular blog posts and in the course of a typical work week, I find myself doing a fair amount of writing.  But what struck me recently is how rarely I use Microsoft Word to assist with that writing.  When writing something that requires thought I normally start in a simple text editor.  I find the lack of options helps me focus — and when it comes time to move it to an email, blog post, or even a Word file, it is easy to copy and paste the text.  MS Word’s tendency to drag along boat-loads of non-standard formatting is such a pain I actively avoid using it for any writing destined for web delivery.  Start collaborating with a tool like Google Docs and Word becomes superfluous.

In our department alone we’d save $5,000 annually in licensing by ditching office — tempting in these tight financial times.  At home Ethan and Leo both use OpenOffice for all their school work with no difficulties. – they have word processing, presentation and spreadsheet capabilities.    For my part I currently use Microsoft Access, Visio and Excel for database work quite a bit.  But a move to MySQL and other open source tools (OpenOffice’s Base) could cure this need.  So I can definitely see a near-future office environment that does not include MS Office coming.

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