[phpesp-general] evaluation of phpESP

[Christopher A. <chr...@st...>]

I am evaluating phpESP as a possible large scale application offered as 
a service to a couple hundred organizations, with potentially many 
thousands of survey responses. I have been creating surveys and testing 
them and now I have a couple of general questions for those that have 
been using it for awhile. Some are fairly obvious to me, but I will ask 
anyway. Note: this is not criticism of the software, just an analysis 
with a critical eye, information that needs to be reported to a 
higher-up for evaluation.

Authentication/access: I understand how the users/groups work and it 
seems to work quite well. I am wondering if anyone is doing 
authentication into the surveys by querying an existing mysql user 
database. We can run our users through our proxy with their regular 
authentication off a mysql database, but it would be nice if we could 
integrate that with the survey creation, editing, testing, administering 
  permissions.

Capacity/scalability: This could potentially have several hundred survey 
s being created during the same period of time and potentially there 
could be tens of thousands of responses. I understand the power and 
limitations of mysql and assume that this would be mostly dependent on 
the server speed and capacity.

Help/support/upgrading: How often is the software upgraded and is that 
based on a response to user input? Do users post patches, add-ons, etc.? 
Does the Developer list take input from users and is the General list 
the one-stop-shop for help?

Statistical output/analysis: Are there any problems with the compilation 
of data? Are users creating add-ons that offer other ways of analyzing 
the data.


Thank you for any information that you may want to share.
-- 


Christopher Adams
L