Ok, Ok, I understand that requiring a passport to take an anonymous survey does not make this experience of taking the survey anonymous. Let me put it simply, the survey itself is anonymous. The name and passport account that you provided or anything else about you is not associated to your response. It is simply recorded in the database as a record associated to the survey question.

So, yes, the MS Connect site does require a passport account and a light registration in order to gain access to the survey. Oh, the hazards of using passport. So, this data is being stored on a secure server that we use to run our betas for Microsoft. I am not sure if anyone noticed, but when you go to the MS Connect site there are a bunch of public betas available behind the available programs link. The SBS 2003 R2 Beta is run on this exact site.

Here is my promise. As soon as the next release of the MS Connect Site becomes available, I will nuke this site and create a new one that does not require any registration at all. The MS Connect team is releasing a new version of their application that will allow me to setup a survey that requires no registration at all. The only bummer was that this release was not avaialble to me when I released the survey and it is still not available for another week and I could not wait to get this one out the door. I needed to tell my manager what the SBS Community thought today. We are really interested in what people think. While I am not happy with the fact that people could "Stuff the ballot box" so to speak with this completely anonymous mechanism, at least it would not be an inhibiting factor for people to take a survey.

Now, for the bloggers. Yes, of course, I would know who you are on the basis that you provided me with your blog URL, but that answer that you provide me with to this question is not linked in any way to any of your other responses. Every question in the survey is stored as an individual record or at least that is how I see it (I haven't looked at the views in the SQL Server Reporting Services DB) So, I cannot go back in (at least that I know of) and see what you answered on any of the other questions. I just know the name of your blog. Now, if you blog, I would hope that you are a person that wants people to know what you think or you wouldn't be blogging.

In my next post, I will provide everyone with the SBS Blog links that were provided to me during the survey. I have contacted pretty much everyone that provided me with a blog link and so far no one has objected to the idea. I want to update the SBS Community Page as well to make sure we have an up to date set of links to SBS Community Blogs too.

Thanks,

Kevin