UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer is a single integrated system for the electronic collection of survey data. It is a secure, scalable, fault tolerant, and high performance system.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer integrates seamlessly with other UNICOM Intelligence products. For example, you can translate the questionnaires using Translation Utility, view and print the questionnaires for review using the Questionnaire Viewer, use UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper to format the same questionnaire as a paper survey, use UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add-on and Eyes & Hands for Forms to scan the written responses and store them in the same database that is used for the data collected electronically using UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer. As a final step, you can analyze the data using the Survey Results activity or UNICOM Intelligence Reporter - Survey Tabulation.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer supports both inbound and outbound calling. With inbound calling (also known as Web interviewing), respondents either enter a specific URL that starts an interview (usually via an authentication page), or go to a web site and click a link that starts an interview. With outbound calling (also know as CATI, or computer-assisted telephone interviewing), interviewers call participants, ask the questions, and enter the respondents' answers. Individual projects may support one or both interviewing methods.

The majority of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer activities are browser based and are run through UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin. However, there are also a number of desktop applications that allow scriptwriters to build and activate projects outside UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin. This means that scriptwriters can work remotely to build, activate, and test interview scripts without requiring access to the main UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer installation.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer uses HTML templates and cascading style sheets for page formatting which means that you have almost total control over the appearance of your interview pages, and can replicate your company standards for other printed or web based literature in your interviews.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer uses SOAP over HTTP for interprocess communication (IPC). This gives great flexibility over how the components are hosted. For instance, all of the components can be hosted within a single process, or the components can be hosted in multiple processes across multiple computers.

IIS hosting also means that multiple instances of the Web and/or the Interview tiers can be run on a single computer. This allows for single computer clustering, providing fault tolerance if a single process fails, but not providing fault tolerance if the entire server fails. A benefit of single computer clustering is that UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer can scale to take advantage of high-end servers that have more than two gigabytes of physical memory.

Although it is not typical to have multiple instances of the Web tier on a single computer, situations do arise where this may be desirable. One example is where you want to have multiple URLs for a project such as one that is run for both in-house and external participants. In-house participants would take the survey using a URL on one Web tier while external participants would use a different URL on the second Web tier. Another example is where you want to use different templates for different types of users, perhaps using larger fonts for participants who are known to have difficulties reading small type.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer provides process isolation, and objects are restarted in the event of failure. This means that when an interview fails, it is restarted without affecting other interviews in the project or the rest of the system.