Online Survey And Collaborative Discussion: SharePoint?

I have had to recently engage the staff and management of a geographically dispersed research organization in re-evaluating and analyzing the key issues that were limiting their online communication effectiveness. As many other similar organizations their IT department has standardized its operations on Microsoft software and kindly offered to integrate Microsoft SharePoint in our strategic evaluation process in which we needed to run a survey and to have an open discussion area to interact on critical issues and priorities. Only after a few initial test runs, in which our only goal was to create an effective survey, and an easy to access discussion area we realized that SharePoint did not have the muscle and flexibility we were looking for. Formatting and layout controls were next inexistent. Ability to organically collect and export data input from participants also required a lot of manual work. We were discouraged much earlier than I would have ever imagined, given the hype and recommendations from many to try out this collaboration platform. In one word: disappointing. I ended up mixing SurveyMonkey, a long time solid performer that has never let me down in the several years I have been using it, an open, registration-free discussion area powered by QuickTopic, and finally a Movable-Type powered journal, where I summarize and bring together all of the relevant content and progress emerging from the other two contribution facilities.