If you want to add a suggestion box to your SharePoint intranet, and allow anonymous entries, how can you do it? The new Community Kit has an anonymous entry feature for blogs, but it only applies to comments, not the original post. infoPath also apparently allows anonymous entries, but if you're not developing in infoPath (or not on MOSS 2007 Enterprise version), you'll need another solution.
One of my clients recently was tasked with setting up a question-and-answer forum on her Intranet where the CEO would answer employee questions. They wanted the employees to be able to post questions anonymously. My client suggested using SharePoint Designer to hide the user's name from the post. You can't edit the existing forms for a list, but she was on the right track – by creating a custom Edit and View form for the list (the New form does not include the "creator" field), you can easily remove the creator field from the pages.
There are two hitches:
1. ALL entries are anonymous to the end users, it's not optional to display your name.
2. Contributor rights allow users to create views on the list, and a savvy user could create a view that includes the submitter name.
If #1 is not a dealbreaker, you can get around #2 by creating a custom rights level (i.e. "Contribute – no view creation") and applying it to this list. You can copy the Contributor permission, and uncheck the Manage Personal Views box:
Then apply this permission level to the user group on your custom list, and you're all set. (Note that anyone with regular Contribute or Full Control rights could still see who the contributors are; you may have to ensure that the Owners group does not have access to this list, and leave only the System Account as the administrator.)
