custom questionnaires in Alfresco

[mezga]

Hi guys!

We are working on a project which has just begun. Requirements are still pretty vague, one thing is almost sure that we have to use Alfresco EE for it's implementation.

The simplified specification looks like this:

We have 2 roles in the system, inviters and invitees. The inviter invites someone outside of the system and assigns questionnaires to this person. The invited person joins the system (becomes invitee) and he has to answer to the questions in the questionnaires. He can save the process in the middle to continue later on or he can check back and review or change his answers anytime he wants to.
Upon finishing, he presses a button and then all his questionnaires are considered done and processed and the inviter of this person gets a notification that the invited is finished and his answers are now accessible. The invitee no longer has any responsibilities in the system.
The user base will be quite substantial and the questionnaires will be custom for each inviter with the option to modify them as well.

Our main concern is how to create dynamically updateable/changeable questionnaires which can be displayed to the invitees in a way that after they fill it and post it back, the answers could be evaluated.

Is there an "Alfresco way" to do this without huge customization?

[jpotts]

Just being perfectly honest here, I don't see this as a great use case for Alfresco. Reasons…

- Is very structured, lending itself to relational database persistence and subsequent querying, which is not a key strength of Alfresco

- Has nothing to do with files, documents, or workflow

- Requires dynamic content model/form constructs, which can be done but is not really a core strength

- Sounds like it will require significant per-user personalization

Now, with that said, if you want to use Alfresco to manage survey questions and then publish those out to a front-end somewhere, and that application would be responsible for dynamically constructing the form, personalization, etc., maybe that's a fit.

Or, you could use something like Oberon forms to create forms that users fill out and those form designs and potentially the answers could be stored in Alfresco.

It's just that, as described, it is pretty far from a document management repo use case. I'd look first at a custom web app.

Jeff