Anonymous access in SharePoint 2010 Survey

Filling up survey form in SharePoint is one of the common tasks that we perform. However when we want to capture a feedback in terms of survey but we would not like to know the name of a person who responded to survey then anonymous survey comes into the picture.

We directly cannot create a SharePoint 2010 anonymous survey. First we need to configure the site to have an anonymous site and then we can configure survey list to allow anonymous access.

First we need to make a setting in central administration. Go to Manage web applications->Select your specific web app->Click on zone type Default->then check the enable anonymous access.

Here are these steps shown as screen shots.

Now select anonymous policy from the ribbon and select None.

Now open your site to enable anonymous access. You can see this option only when you have set the anonymous option from the central administration.

You need to set where you would want to enable the anonymous access.

I’ve selected lists and library because we want to create an anonymous survey.

Open your survey list where you want to configure anonymous survey. First step that needs to be performed is to break the inheritance from the parent site. Without this step, we cannot configure anonymous survey.

Go to list settings and then permissions for a list and then click on anonymous access. This model page allows you to configure the action that anonymous user can perform. However you might see all options grayed out.

The reason behind this is strange, however these is a work around to this. Go to advance settings option of the list and then select read all responses.

Now again go back to the permission and then select anonymous access. You should be good to go for setting up the permissions.

Now the problem is we do not want other people to see other’s responses although created by field is always empty when we enable the anonymous survey, but still we do not want any person to read any other person’s response.

So go back to advance settings and now change from real all responses to read responses that were created by user.

And there you go, give link URL to respond to anyone and they should be able to respond to a survey. At the same time created by field will always be blank so that we never come to know who responded to survey.

As you can see I have three responses but who responded cannot be known.