Festive Spirit - Major New Release

To celebrate the festive season we plan to implement a major new release of the Survey Galaxy website on Sunday 14 December.

While the upgrade is in progress the website will be down for a short period of time but we will do our best to ensure that any downtime is kept to a minimum.

With Survey Galaxy you were always able to create surveys in a number of major languages but with the new release we will now fully support the UTF-8 character set and we also introduce the ability to deploy a single survey in multiple languages.

For members who have a requirement to make their their surveys available in multiple languages, for example French/English, English/Welsh or even provide localised versions of the same survey for example English UK/English US, our new translation feature is the perfect solution.

You will not be restricted in the number of translations you can apply although practical limitations may make supporting more than three impractical.

Where a survey is offered with multiple translations, the survey's base language is specified and all the results are automatically rolled up into the base language, save for free text comment and data which will remain in their native language.

For languages that we have a translation for, a deployed survey's system messages and button titles are displayed in the selected language. Where we do not have the necessary translations the system messages will revert to English.

We have also taken the opportunity to make a number of other changes and added more functionality and streamlined our pricing structure.

Once the release is live we will spotlight some of the new features here but in the meantime more details can be found through reading the release notes.

Results Analyzer Report and Charts

We often get requests asking how the Results Analyzer's reports and charts can be printed and/or included in a Word or PowerPoint presentation.

To help our members in this respect a document that describes a number of methods that can be used to print and email the Results Analyzer charts and reports has been added to the Information page's Guides section.

Survey Galaxy - Online Cost Estimator

We have made a number of changes to our online cost estimator to help simplify the process of obtaining a quote.

Survey Galaxy's Security and Resilience Features

An overview of Survey Galaxy's security and resilience features has been added to the Survey Galaxy Information page's Policy section.

Mail Merge - New Guide

A Mail Merge document that describes how Microsoft Outlook's Mail Merge facility can be used to distribute survey invitations has been added to the Survey Galaxy Information page's Guides section. Although the document specifically deals with Microsoft's Outlook application the principles of mail merge are much the same for other Office type mail merge applications.

Using a mail merge facility is an ideal way of managing a survey and when used with Survey Galaxy's ability to pass a reference to the survey they can be used to help manage the responses so that you can identify respondents who have completed, partially completed and those that have not yet started their response to a survey.

Online Results Analyzer Enhancements

We are pleased to report that the Header and Footer elements of the online Results Analyzer have now been improved to provide WYSIWYG style editing. If required you are still able to switch to HTML source code mode for more advanced style formatting.

The online Results Analyzer will also now display a warning message to remind users of privacy and confidentiality issues whenever public access is set to anything other than deny.

Enhancement - Survey publication dates set in the future

A feature of Survey Galaxy is that you can publish a survey with a start date set in the future.

An enhancement has now been released that will allow the author, of a survey that is published on pay-as-you-go basis with a publication start date set in the future, to complete the survey prior to the specified publication start date so that they can fully test the survey.

Please note that test data can be purged prior to the official survey start date.

Enhancement for subscribers

When subscribers publish surveys the publication end date is automatically set to the current subscription end date.

Subscribers can stop a publication at anytime before that date by selecting the survey and using the 'Stop Publication' menu option.

If a subscriber wants to specify a specific publication end date this can now be done by publishing a survey and then using the 'Edit details' menu option and specifying a 'Publication End Date'.

New Feature - Grid Pulldown support

We are pleased to announce support for single selection pull down list when using grids is now available.

The 'pull down' format is available by selecting the 'text entry field grid' format and then using the column heading's 'Column Attributes' button and selecting the 'pulldown' data type option.

An example of the new format would be:-



This allows the respondent to display a list of options:-



And make a selection:



This is in addition to the other formats already supported by the 'text entry field grid' format:-

Happy New Year

Everyone at Survey Galaxy would like to wish all our visitors a very prosperous 2008.