Hey everyone, As you may know, the new version of LimeSurvey is here! We made several changes to the user interface to improve the user experience. So we have been working on making the first steps in terms of stabilizing and improving the user interface. More enhancements are on the way, we will keep you posted. The following is the new UI design changelog for the latest version of LimeSurvey. We will update you on even more changes to the user interface and other new features in future articles. Below you will find the major user interface improvements to help you get started quickly and easily. Enjoy! “Create survey” shortcut in main navigation You just want to get going and cut to the chase? Great, just choose the first item from the main navigation and you’re ready to go. One click and you are exactly where you want to be, the survey section. Modals (Pop-Ups) All pop-ups in the application now have the same style and are built according to a certain structure to make the whole workflow more user-friendly. Page headers To get a better understanding of where you are in the application we have introduced green banners at the top of every screen of the application. Top bar The most important action buttons have been moved to the top bar and the amount of action buttons has been reduced to the essentials. Action buttons All action buttons are now styled in the same way and one specific action will always have the same icon associated with it for consistency. The most important actions are consistently positioned in the same location, to the left of the top bar. Furthermore, the most important action buttons have been moved to the left-hand side of all tables and we brought consistency in terms of icons, hovers, margins and the order of buttons. Additionally, small text balloons will appear when hovering over them, explaining the functionality of the concerning button. Tables All tables now have a new grid view class and are consistently styled and structured. You will find all buttons to help you see more information or make edits on the far left-hand side of the table. This helps you better manage your surveys, data and survey participants. Icons and small elements Three different icons for a single functionality like “Save”? No thanks! One icon is associated with exactly one functionality to make the design more accessible. The consistency makes for a better user experience. We also synchronized other small elements like dropdown-menu icons, page buttons of tables, main navigation elements and notifications. Pagination Under every table of the application you can now find consistent pagination to the far right-hand side. You can determine how many items you want your table to show you and, by doing so, customize your survey management. We hope you enjoy the new version! Now it is even easier to turn your questions into answers. We will update this changelog with more content whenever there are new elements to the user interface.More blog posts with specifics about these improvements and other changes to the user interface will follow in the upcoming period, so stay tuned. Have a nice day, everybody!
User Interface Design Changelog
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We are absolutely psyched. We have been named one of Top 20 Most Popular Survey Software Products and Top 20 Most Affordable Survey Software Products by Capterra (online resource for software buyers). Capterra Award Assessments Top 20 Most Popular Survey Software Products is an independent assessment that evaluates customer base, number of active users, and social presence to generate a list of market leaders in the survey software space that offer the most widely adopted solutions. Top 20 Most Affordable Survey Software Products is an independent assessment that evaluates the standard features offered by a product, cost of these features, and customer reviews on feature fit, value and quality. Feel free to rate us on Capterra by clicking the badge below.
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Employee trainings are programmes with a short-term learning goal to impart new knowledge and skills to staff to enable an immediate impact of the learning efforts. Employee developments are programmes with a long-term learning goal to promote employee growth and performance in future endeavours. The importance of employee training and development Training and developing employees is extremely important for organisations to remain competitive, i.e. to outperform competitor organisations with the help of highly skilled, productive staff. Furthermore, staff is supposed to be retained to avoid losing key employees and consequently valuable knowledge to competitor organisations. In recent decades, the organisational landscape has changed fundamentally due to technology and digitisation. This radical change will continue to shape the business context in the future. Training and development programmes will help keep employees up to date. The importance of training and development programmes manifests itself on two levels, the organizational and the employee level. Importance of training and development on the organizational level: Retaining high-performing key employees by presenting the prospect of promotions as a result of their skill advancement through training programmes Increasing profits and business growth by outperforming competition due to higher talent and productivity of staff Improving internal exchange of newly acquired knowledge due to spill-over effects in employee interaction Importance of training and development on the employee level: Increasing employee satisfaction and motivation by acquiring new knowledge and skills that are beneficial personally and professionally Increasing employee engagement and empowerment which drives better staff dynamics in terms of cooperation and productivity in their jobs Better organisational reputation in the eyes of employees for enabling personal development which in turn leads to better employer reviews and word-of-mouth recommendation If an organisation is able to master its training and development routine, it's looking at a win-win-situation that doesn’t merely improve the organisation's status quo, but also benefits staff. Microlearning as a means to sustainable development Microlearning is an approach that covers micro units, i.e. small amounts, of learning content, usually over a short-term period with regard to knowledge acquisition. This learning approach has been increasingly deployed by organisations as a reaction to a natural paradigmatic shift in learning and attention habits of human beings in a digitised world. Due to stronger mechanisation within the past decades, people have handed off a large amount of tasks to computers as these can handle repetitive tasks with more speed and efficiency. Furthermore, smartphone and tablet devices have made instant access to digital content on virtually any topic at any time of the day possible at the fingertips of the people. Peoples’ neurological systems have adapted to this easily accessible overload of information by an enhancement of the short-term memory and learning at the expense of long-term learning areas of the brain. Effectively, the effort to acquire and retain knowledge long-term exceeds the capabilities necessary to do so in the first place. Microlearning methods counteract this trend by offering short and highly specialised learning topics across all modern devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. This way, employees can learn flexibly whenever and wherever they want as well as more effectively by concentrating on a distinct and concise piece of content each time. Step-by-step guide to creating effective training programmes In order to develop training programmes that will lead to sustainable learning, videos, animations, quizzes or games can be used to trigger emotions in employees such as excitement, curiosity and ambition. In addition, getting employees to actively engage with the training content is important to improve the learning experience. In general, sustainable learning will work better if the motivation to acquire new knowledge and skills is intrinsically based as opposed to being extrinsically led by incentives and perks. Moreover, in order to determine the effectiveness of training and development programmes, accurate performance measurement needs to be ensured, i.e. evaluating the progress of training completion by employees. Software solutions for training and development courses Today’s organisational digital infrastructures make it easier than ever to create and conduct employee training and development programmes and courses with the help of e-learning platforms. Many platforms offer ready-to-use learning units and solutions within paid memberships and subscriptions. The advantage of these offers is the fast accessibility and applicability within an organisation when getting training and development programmes off the ground. Disadvantages of this approach are the large costs involved in such memberships, which often make it difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to afford. Using an online survey software tool such as LimeSurvey is a great alternative to set up and conduct training programmes as it offers flexible implementation of different media formats like videos and animations, images and texts as well as quizzes and tests. This applies to users with our without coding knowledge. Especially small and medium-sized organisations can benefit from the entirety of free features in LimeSurvey without the need for spending big budgets. Furthermore, its open source nature facilitates the setup and customisation of the training programme and its measurement tracking.
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Download now a spreadsheet example of an entire LimeSurvey questionnaire structure that is ready to be imported into LimeSurvey and can be sent to respondents immediately. Feel free to check it out, there is more documentation on this topic in our manual.
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Feel free to download it to your computer to have it at hand whenever you need it.
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Over time, especially since the 17th century, and up until today, the conventional way of holding elections on democratic political decision processes has been to show up at local poll sites in person and take a vote on a specific matter by selecting a choice on a piece of paper and dropping it into a ballot box. Ever since technology and digitisation have produced a worldwide domination of New Media that has subsequently lead to an increase in international interconnectedness due to social networks and big data accumulation, new ways of running elections online have inevitably been trending. The advantages are clear: worldwide potential target audiences, 24/7 voting possible, no need for physical encounters or polling setups, convenient and fast election evaluations. Contrary to widespread conception, LimeSurvey is not just an online survey software, but rather a data-driven tool that can be used for numerous different purposes such as training sessions, quizzes, appointment management and naturally for elections. The essentials for your election Elections need to meet certain structural and legal requirements, but no worries, LimeSurvey has you covered. Participant management: before running an election, it is necessary to define the general suffrage, i.e. who gets to participate in the election, as most elections - unless at state level – do not include the participation of an entire population. By using the participant management feature, you can invite a specific group of people to participate in the election by creating a token table. Said tokens grant exclusive access to the online election and furthermore avoid unauthorized voting or multiple participation. Email invitations: the aforementioned participant management feature comes with an integrated email invitation function which is a comfortable method of distributing the path to your election. Depending on the LimeSurvey hosting you use, you can either send email invitations from your own mail server or rely on our LimeSurvey mail server, the choice is yours. Data security: in line with the choice between different mail server hosting possibilities is the storage of your election data either on one our five secure, GDPR-compliant servers (in Germany, the UK, the US, Canada and Australia) or on your own server. We provide our tool for both options to grant you full flexibility and maximum data security when conducting elections. Anonymized voting: in order to comply with legal conditions of classified voting, responses can be fully anonymized in LimeSurvey with a single click. Quota management: if your election requires only a certain ratio of voters based on specific criteria, e.g. gender, age or origin, you can easily set up a quota in LimeSurvey that defines the exact compilation of voters you need and dismisses any additional respondents that exceed this quota. Scheduling: "The nature of democracy is that elected officials are accountable to the people, and they must return to the voters at prescribed intervals to seek their mandate to continue in office. For that reason most democratic constitutions provide that elections are held at fixed regular intervals." (Wikipedia: "Election"). In LimeSurvey, you may reuse a created election by simply copying it. Furthermore, there is no limitation on how many surveys or elections you create and conduct. The best part: your election can be scheduled to run at a certain start and end time and therefore automate the validity period. Statistics: in order to transform electoral votes into actionable decisions, it is necessary to process your data with the help of statistical evaluations. Whether you need fast ready-built charts and/or result tables or whether you require even more advanced statistics by making use of our various export options, nobody will be left high and dry. Offline elections: if you do however need to run your election offline and want to add some convenience to your setup, you can simply go hybrid with LimeSurvey. Firstly, set up the election electronically on your computer. Then, print the election structure on paper to run it offline. Finally, type the results in to your computer and evaluate the data. Less error-prone and cleaner overall process. The future of elections Elections always have been and increasingly will be exciting endeavours in a more digitized future. Take the recent referendum in the United Kingdom to bring about an exit from the European Union as an example to realize the sheer power that elections can bundle. Thanks to seemingly infinite and immediate access to knowledge on the internet anywhere in the world, election systems need to adapt to this highly dynamic environment. Therefore, it makes sense to assume that elections will be conducted electronically more and more in the future to enable group-decision-making. Thus, software is required that can deliver on two main dimensions throughout setup, conduct and evaluation of elections: convenience and power. LimeSurvey offers you both, test it for free!
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LimeSurvey Security Advisory 02/2018IMPORTANT: There has been a highly critical issue uncovered which allows an attacker to gain access to your Limesurvey installation and probably webspace. Type of issue The issue lets an attacker gain access to your LimeSurvey configuration file by using a vulnerability of the LimeSurvey Installer.The vulnerability was uncovered by the NguyenVan Tien Thanh (@yeuchimse) from Viettel Cyber Security Center and we are very grateful for the responsible disclosure. Affected LimeSurvey versions This issue affects all LimeSurvey versions starting from 2.x.Note: The LimeSurvey Professional hosting services are/were NOT affected. Exploits in the Wild There is currently no known exploit in the wild. Advised solution Update as soon as possible! There are two possible ways to resolve this issue: The quick way: This way works for all versions: Delete the file /application/controller/InstallerController.php from your LimeSurvey directory. This file is not needed by LimeSurvey anymore after installation. The update way:We prepared different update versions to keep the impact as small as possible: If you are using 2.6.x LTS, use ComfortUpdate to update to 2.6.7 LTS. If you are using 2.7x.x, use ComfortUpdate to update to version 2.73.1 or download version 2.73.1 here. If you are using 3.x, use ComfortUpdate to version 3.4.2 or download 3.4.2 here. Recommendations We recommend to use one of the advised solutions as soon as possible. Though there are no known exploits in the wild, there might very well be some coming soon.
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Amazing news! LimeSurvey 3 stable release is now available. Head over to our download section get it. Current LimeSurvey Professional and Premium (ComfortUpdate) users can expect to receive the update automatically in the coming weeks.