What's new in EFS 7.0 – Details

Panelist Profile

Member profiles and search features which allow to find other members are for sure among the most important characteristics of any type of online community.

Profiles are the online face of the members:

* They offer central access to all data available for a member which are of relevance for community life – be it a simple nick and avatar in an anonymous community, be it detailed personal data, self-descriptions and results of community ratings in more complex communities. * Usually the members use their profiles to introduce themselves, beyond the minimum set of data necessary for registration and participation. E.g. they write short bios or upload personal pictures. * bei Christine vorbeischauen

A search feature provides orientation in the community:

• It allows to find and contact members which you have met e.g. in a chat of the community.
• It allows to look for members who share the same interests.
• Depending of how the search tool is configured, you might be able to gain an overview on the composition of the community.

A variety of new tools and templates in EFS Panel Community Edition 7.0 enables you to configure panelist profiles and search features, according to the needs of your panel community:

• You can define yourself which data should, in principle, be available for display and search.
• Optionally, you can configure the website to display only data which the panelists have explicitly released for publishing. This is of special importance with audience groups who have a strong interest in privacy or in countries with strict privacy laws.
• Panelist profiles, search form and results list are set up by combining one single form and one single module. A variety of setting options guarantee flexibility: e.g. you can display data on the profile which are not included in search or results list.
• You can set up different types of profiles for the various language versions of a panel. Even in one single language version, you can work with several sets of profiles. If there is an expert group with an own forum among your panelists, you could, for example, use simple profiles with just a few personal data for the whole community, while the experts have more detailed profiles and search functions in their „private“ area.

Related to Panelist Profiles

• Panelist Ratings: A typical characteristics of community sites is the rating of other participants: By assigning points or other units of a social currency, the participants show sympathy or praise for each other.
• Display of Active Panelists: A frequenty-requested feature for community sites is a counter that shows how many community members are currently online. With ESF Panel Community Edition, it is quite easy to realize such a counter. If you display only the number of panelists, list them by name or show their profile pictures, is up to your choice and creativity.

Panelist Blogs

Your Panelists have a story to tell? Let them share their opinions within your online community. Panelist blogs are one of the most important novelties in EFS Panel 7 – Community Edition.

• Each panelist can have their own blog. Depending of the goals of your research, you can realize diary-like, private blogs, accessible only for their author and the panel administration, or public blogs which other panelists can comment on.
• Just a few clicks are needed to present the best blogs on an overview page on the website.

Related to Panelist Blogs

• Featured Blogs: Community websites will often present well-done or popular blogs of their members in special lists or on overview pages. With EFS Panel, you can easily create such an overview page, e.g. to present the blogs of your star bloggers, to introduce the blogs of new panelists or to highlight your own blog with official news.
  
  

Forum & Chat

If you want to create a chat, a guest book or a forum for a quick exchange of opinions, you can use the discussions tool newly introduced to EFS 7.0.

This new tool is the “light” version of the forum (previously: bulletin board): You can use it for types of communication which are characterized by a quick, non-structured sequence of short posts, as e.g. chats or guest books.

For detailed discussions, which might require a thread structure and features as e.g. Reply w/quote or upload of images, you might want to use the familiar forum.

Image and Document Exchange, Feed Management

The download management function for the panel website allows the creation of download lists, which panelists can use to download files, or even to actively exchange files among each other.

If you use EFS Panel as platform for a community, you can release the upload function for the panelists, thus encouraging the exchange e.g. of images.

With EFS Panel Community Edition 7.0, you can easily enhance the news section of your panel by integrating texts from external sources. All you need to do, is subscribe to the external RSS or atom feed of the respective source, and the feed entries will be imported into the panel news automatically.

Since the previous release EFS 6.0, you can use Flash to create an appealing, engaging questionnaire.
For EFS 7.0 we have optimized the user interface of the Flash features, based on the customer feedback and practical experiences made since last autumn.

Enhanced Flash Question Types

In the previous release EFS 6.0, the EFS Flash question types were the big novelty. Based on the customer feedback and practical experiences made since last autumn, we have optimized the user interface, to provide more transparency and overview.
New in EFS 7.0: A new, intuitive user interface contains all functions and effects needed to design an appealing Flash survey.
Furthermore, we have added several feature requests which were repeatedly named by customers:

• You can easily activate a 3D effect and drop shadow via the new user interface.
• If a question is too long for the screen and a respondent drags an item at the lower bottom of the screen, automated scroll-down will be triggered.
• In the scale container of a Drag&Drop matrix, vertical scroll bars will be displayed if needed.
• Simple Matrix and Drag&Drop matrix can be layouted completely independent from each other.
• You can choose between Drag&Drop matrix questions with and without card counter.

A key objective of 7.0 was to make life easier for survey, panel and community administrators:

• Working with survey messages will be a lot easier in future: newly-introduced copy, import and export functions allow to easily adopt messages from other projects. For multilingual surveys, the set of default messages is available in 29 languages
• Besides offering more comfort and transparency, the new project quota include a range of configuration options which allow to adopt the quota process to your requirements.
• In EFS Panel, a variety of new grouping features have been added, most of them repeatedly requested by customers. Among others, a statistics tool to analyze group composition is available. The alternative grouping filters support date calculations, the participants of a survey can be added to a group automatically, and much more.
• Sampling for Panel surveys is more comfortable now, too. Among others, the alternative grouping filters can be used to define the basic set.
• The new capacity filters enable you to realize a flexible scheduling system for your Panel.

Message sets

Survey messages are a fundamental element of online surveys. Buttons and login fields, plausibility check messages and central system messages as, for example, “This survey has already been closed” – all these texts need to be drafted, and maybe translated as well. In EFS 7.0, working with survey messages is considerably more comfortable:

• The set of default messages is available in 29 languages now. If you want to run a project in one or several of these languages, you can simply use the prepared default version.
• You can copy a set of survey messages and modify the copy according to your requirements.
• It is possible to export survey messages and import them into other EFS 7.0 installations.
• You can compare two selected sets of survey messages.
  
  

New Project Quota Module

EFS 7.0 includes a new quota tool which is considerably more flexible and dynamic than the old project quotas.

• A variety of configuration options enables you to modify the quota process according to your requirements. E.g. you can decide if quota based on participant data should be checked at survey start or later, or you can assign participants to all matching open quota instead of only one quota.
• The new quota feature can respond dynamically to the allocation numbers. Thus, you can optionally fill quota with low allocation numbers first (“low bucket fill”).
• The following variables can be used for quota definitions: project variables, user-defined variables and GET parameters, various system data and depending of the project type participant data, address data of panelists, all master data and tracking variables in the panel.
• A quota import is available.
  
  

Panel Grouping Features

Huge changes were made on all kind of grouping functionality in EFS Panel. Beyond redesigned user interfaces for editing and listing of groups, EFS 7.0 now offers some major improvements on panelist grouping.

• New feature: Statistics which can be created for individual groups. The analysis variable and two split variables can be selected.
• New filter variables: Use date calculations, based on the units day, month, year, week and hour.
• New filter sources: A quick poll could be used as base of a new panel group.
• More Complex: Subconditions in master data filters can be joined by AND or OR condition. (In EFS 6.0 only AND).
• Up-to-date automatically: Panelists who take part in a specific survey could automatically assigned to a group – if they match your update rule.
  
  

Panel Capacity Filters

The old scheduling feature of EFS Panel has been replaced by a new system, which is based on the familiar EFS filters.

• Which panelists should be treated as available – i.e. have not been used to their full capacity yet -, is defined using a so-called capacity filter.
• When drawing samples, the capacity filter can be used to define the basic set.
• The number of capacity filters on an EFS Panel installation is not limited. You decide which definition of availability should be used for a project by selecting the appropriate capacity filter when drawing samples.
  
  

Sampling for Surveys

The edit dialog for samples has been overhauled, several new functions have been added:

• The user interface has been modernized.
• The content of the Define basic set tab is presented in a new order: To improve overview, the functions have been split into standard options and extended options.
• Alternative grouping filters can be used to define the basic set.
• The stratification dialog provides more info. Futhermore, you can decide yourself if cell values should be interlaced or not.
• If you want to route sample members to an external survey, you have to work with personalized links. The functions to manage these links have been rebuilt to offer more comfort of use: You can not only upload, but export and delete links now. The respective functions are available as buttons on the Sample content tab, the old Import links tab has been removed

Improving and securing data quality, particularly with regard to the requirements of the ESOMAR guidelines, has been one of the main topics of the last release 6.0: in this context, among others, panel tracking and the new automated duplicates check were introduced. In EFS 7.0, we go one step further: in future, EFS supports validation of survey participants by the external service provider  RelevantView.

Relevant ID – Keep your Data Clean

EFS supports an external validation of survey participants by  RelevantView. RelevantView checks the participants’ origin and identity and marks invalid participants, i.e.

• participants from countries/regions/cities not allowed for the survey
• duplicate respondents

Thus, you can identify them easily and take appropriate measures, e.g. by deleting duplicates or excluding data records from further analysis.

Complete Overhaul of Panel Statistics

The panel statistics has been overhauled completely.

• Split by two characteristics is possible.
• Optionally, the results of all variables can be printed in one table block.
• Panel statistics for candidates status and language version status are predefined for several time intervals.

A significant portion of enhancements were made “under the hood” to increase scalability and performance:

• A massive change of the underlying data base structure allows to lift the former limitation of variable numbers for survey projects. The number of master data permitted on a panel installation has been increased, too.
• Due to improvements of data base structure and refactoring of key panel functionalities, the performance of large panels has been improved considerably.
• The mail process is organized more effectively in EFS 7.0. In future, considerably more mails can be sent, the available volume will be distributed dynamically between all dispatch orders.

Master Data Variables

The method how master data are stored and handled has been changed fundamentally in EFS 7.0. For you, as a panel owner or administrator, this means:

• Up to 2,700 master data can be created on a panel installation in future, instead of 2,400 master data as in the past.
• The variable names of master data can have up to 20 characters, instead of only eight characters as in the past.
• If you work with master data (e.g. trigger a recoding), it will not be necessary anymore to lock the complete master data table as long as your action may take. I.e. the performance will improve when working with master data. For actions which affect the master data table itself, though, the table will have to be kept locked (creation and deletion of master data, change of data type).
  This changes have been made possible, in brief, by transferring the master data table to the table type InnoDB and by adapting the data base structure newly introduced for EFS Survey project variables for the master data of EFS Panel, specifically
  
  

Increased Number of Variables per Survey

One of the most important changes in EFS 7.0 is the lifting of the limitation of variable numbers. While so far, up to 2.400 variables could be used per survey project, you can work almost without limits in EFS 7.0: technically, up to 120.000 variables are possible.
This considerable extension has been realized by a massive change of the underlying data base structure. Until EFS 6.0, one MySQL database table with up to 2.400 columns was created for each project. From EFS 7.0 on, up to 61 of these tables can be created if required. The creation of new tables and the distribution of the data is handled automatically by the system.
Static start page
EFS recognizes features which are not supported by the static start page, and blocks if you try to make a page with such features “static”. The static start page does not support:

• Question types requiring Javascript (Flash question types: 611, 621, 641, 661 and Slider: 341 ,342)
• Plausichecks and DACs
• Hiding conditions and randomization
• Conjoint block on first page
  
  

Panel Performance

EFS Panel supports a growing amount of large panels with several hundred thousand panelists (~250,000 panelists). To improve the performance of panels of this size was one of the main goals of EFS 7.0. In this context, considerable changes have been made to the data base structure:

• The method how panelists, panel groups and assignments of panelists to groups are stored has been optimized for the needs of up-to-date large EFS Panels.
• Various important tables have been transferred to the table type InnoDB. With this table type, it is not necessary anymore to lock the whole table for every single action, i.e. the change accelerates the installation considerably.
• The JavaScript navigation in website editor has been modified in a way that it does not need to be reloaded completely for each individual action anymore.
• The list of panelists in panelists administration is now based on the same proven technique which is used for lists per default in all parts of EFS.
• The method how master data are stored and handled has been changed fundamentally in EFS 7.0.
• The panelist import has been overhauled completely, too.