As an enterprise architect, working primarily in the
Microsoft Cloud, I often get asked questions about which form solution a Client
should move forward with in their enterprise. It usually starts with one form
that a business stakeholder has requested or suggested, or with one team that
wishes to publish a few forms. The request and the questions quick spread to
multiple teams that want to do something similar in the spirit of "Going
Digital"! Do we continue to use InfoPath like we used to? Do we use SharePoint
Designer to create a list form? Are those things still supported, because we've
heard they're not? Do we create a custom form on a SharePoint site page with a
custom web part... maybe a full page web part? Do we use Microsoft PowerApps,
Microsoft Forms, or a third party solution?
So, I thought I'd share my practical thoughts here to
hopefully benefit many people wondering about the same question. Microsoft has
a long history of form solutions which have come and gone, especially in the
case of SharePoint. The SharePoint and Microsoft technology stack for building
and hosting online forms has gone through significant flux in recent years. It
started with the announcement that Microsoft would discontinue InfoPath back in
January 2014 (anyone remember the InfoPath funeral at the SharePoint
conference). After several years of flux, we finally have a clear path forward
for online forms in SharePoint and in the Microsoft Cloud.
Let's Be Clear on
InfoPath and SharePoint Designer
First of all, let's be clear on InfoPath and SharePoint
Designer - Microsoft has clarified in recent years that InfoPath and SharePoint
Designer will in fact be supported in their last versions, InfoPath 2013 (the
client application, as a separate download, and not included with Office 2016
or later) and SharePoint Designer 2013, until July 2026. This means that
current and recently released versions of SharePoint, so SharePoint 2016 and
SharePoint 2019, will support artifacts created in InfoPath 2013 and SharePoint
Designer 2013. As will SharePoint Online, until further notice. However,
Microsoft has also been clear that no new work, not features, not updates, not
patches, will be put into InfoPath 2013 or SharePoint Designer 2013. Those are
the last versions of those applications.
This effectively means that InfoPath and SharePoint Designer
are on life support, and are still supported for those on premise and online
solutions for Microsoft customers that have a large investment in using
InfoPath and SharePoint Designer and cannot yet move to the new modern
capabilities.
This also means that new modern capabilities added to
SharePoint Online and the Microsoft Cloud will likely not work or integrate
with InfoPath or SharePoint Designer. Effectively, the real use cases in which
InfoPath and SharePoint Designer may be used in conjunction with SharePoint
Online sites to fulfill a business need will get more and more narrow, over a
long period of time, until 2026 in fact.
What you've built in the past is still supported, and you
could still likely use the tools for something simple, but its highly recommend
that you don't look to these technologies to try to build anything modern, or
supported on mobile, or integrated across the Microsoft Cloud. You will have a
long up hill battle!
Microsoft's Go
Forward Online Form Solutions: PowerApps & Forms
As many will tell you, Microsoft's go forward solutions for
Online Forms in the Cloud include both Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Forms.
Microsoft Forms was
released to general availability on April 27, 2018, so its only a little over a
year old in general availability (it had a long preview program before that
which many of us participated in). The solution is still fairly young, but its
intended use cases and purposes are fairly narrow and focused, so it does what
it does very well.
Microsoft PowerApps
was released to general availability on October 31, 2016. It is only a little
over 2 years old. Its important to keep that in mind, because it tells you the
technology is young and still evolving. That said, the technology has come a
long way in just 2 short years.
Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is essentially a light weight, very basic
tool for creating surveys, quizzes and polls that are intended to quickly
collect information. Some general use cases in which we have seen Microsoft
Forms are:
- Surveys to collect end user feedback
- Short forms asking users to register for an
event or to gauge interest in an event
- Simple forms requesting contact information from
users
- Polls to gather employee or customer satisfaction
- Educational environments where teachers wish to
publish a quiz to students to measure information retention, or to test
knowledge of a topic and evaluate progress
With Microsoft Forms, you really can create a simple online
form in minutes which fulfills these use cases. Microsoft Forms does not
replace InfoPath or SharePoint Designer list forms, due to the simple nature of
forms it can create. But it does very quickly fill one particular need with
respect to Forms. It allows you to very quickly and easily:
- Create forms for surveys, polls or quizzes with a simple set
of varied controls, and using simple conditions
- Publish those forms to the internet for users to fill out
anywhere, any time, on any device (desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile)
- Collect submitted data in a central place, which can be
aggregated, summarized and analysed by other tools
- Automatically trigger workflows created in Microsoft Flow
which can integrate the collected data from Microsoft Forms into other systems
One feature that Microsoft Forms has over PowerApps, is that
Forms can be optionally be published so that they can be accessed anonymously.
That's correct, if you need to publish a form to the internet that you want
people on the internet to access and fill out and not require them to login
(because maybe they don't have a user account in your Office 365 tenant) you
cannot do that with Microsoft PowerApps, but you can do that with Microsoft
Forms. This is not the default configuration, but when you publish a form in
Microsoft Forms you can choose to publish it anonymously and not require users
to login - when you do this, any person on the internet with a link to the form
can respond to it.
Access to
Microsoft Forms
Access is controlled through your Office 365 license, and
all Microsoft Office 365 enterprise licenses include one flavor or another of
the Microsoft Forms SKU, including Office 365 Enterprise E1, Enterprise E3 and
Enterprise E5.
There are numerous flavors of the Microsoft Forms license
itself, including those focused on the enterprise (Microsoft Forms plan E1,
plan E3, plan E5), those focused on kiosks or unattended applications (plan K),
and those focused on Education (Plan 2 and Plan 3). You can control if a user
has access to Microsoft Forms for the purpose of creating a publishing a form
by turning ON or OFF the Microsoft Forms SKU in their Office 365 license.
You can learn more about which licenses include Microsoft
Forms
here.
Microsoft Forms is also available for free to Hotmail and
Outlook/Live Microsoft accounts, with some limitations.
Controls
Available in Microsoft Forms and Other Options
There are many common control options available when you're
designing your forms, which are:
- Choice fields where you only select 1 answer
(radio buttons or dropdown)
- Choice fields where you select multiple answers
(check boxes)
- Text Fields
- Ratings
- Dates
- Net Promoter Score Fields (announced at Ignite
2018; for example, "How likely are you to recommend this to a
friend?" with a choice from 1 to 10)
Other options include:
- Options to make fields required
- Options to order fields as desired
- Options to shuffle the options presented to
users
- Options for titles and subtitles on form
questions
- Branding options in the form title
- Suggested questions based on how you start your
form
- Creative ideas presented to you as you are
developing your form
Important
Technical Notes about Microsoft Forms
The following are other important technical notes and
limitations related to Microsoft Forms:
- All data submitted through Microsoft Forms is
stored on servers in the United States or Europe (only if your Office 365
tenant is hosted in Europe). So, if your Office 365 tenant was created and is
hosted in a data center outside of the United States or Europe, your form, its
configuration and any data submitted through your form is stored and hosted in
servers within a US data center. This may or may not fit with your data
residency requirements, so please consider the use of Microsoft Forms carefully
with this in mind.
- If a user who creates and publishes a form using
Microsoft Forms, leaves the organization and their account is disabled and/or
their Microsoft Forms license is removed, then all Microsoft Forms
configuration and data, including submitted form responses, will be deleted 30
days after their user account is deleted from your Azure AD instance.
- Conditional Access does integrate with Microsoft
Forms. You can select Microsoft Forms as a Cloud App in the Cloud Apps
assignment.
There are some limitations as to how many forms a user
account may create, and how many responses they can receive. Forms created
using an enterprise or commercial accounts:
- A single user account may create up to 200 forms
- A single form may have up to 100 questions
- A single form may receive up to 50,000 responses
Finally, surveys and quizzes allow you to collaborate with
others during the creation process by creating and sharing a link to the form
with other users. You can use this same method to save forms as templates and
reuse them over and over again.
Microsoft
PowerApps
Microsoft PowerApps is cloud based technology only available
in the Microsoft Cloud, which allows business analysts as well as software
developers to build custom business applications. It is Microsoft’s go-forward solution for online
forms, and is the intended replacement technology for InfoPath forms, as well
as all previous form technologies.
The solution is not only targeted at software
developers. The solution is targeted at
business analysts or technical specialists within a business function (as
opposed to business users) as some technical abilities are typically required
to build simple PowerApps solutions.
Often business users can easily start a PowerApps solution, but very
quickly they find that some knowledge of JSON or expressions/formulas is
required to achieve the business functionality they wish.
Therefore, PowerApps is typically viewed by most enterprises
as a “low-code” and “rapid application development” solution for building
custom business applications in the Microsoft Cloud. When developing a PowerApps application,
there are two (2) types of applications that may be created:
Canvas
AppA canvas app allows the app developer to
layout supported controls wherever they wish on the page and construct
multi-page applications.
Model
Driven App
A model driven app is created and designed for
the most part based on the data fields you select for the app. They are tightly integrated with the Common
Data Service (CDS) which is the common data model used within Dynamics
365. As you develop a model driven app,
you create entities and fields within the CDS, and the controls are automatically
laid out on your form to support reading and writing of data from and to those
data structures.
All Office 365 enterprise licenses include a PowerApps for Office 365 license. This provides all Office 365 users with standard
PowerApps designer capabilities, in effect enabling all users to create their
own PowerApps. The PowerApps for Office 365 license provides access to Canvas Apps, and it provides access to the Common Data Service (CDS), however only in the default environment.
Any user that will run a PowerApps, meaning if they will fill out an online form built on PowerApps, will run it under the context of their own user account and therefore requires a PowerApps license.
The default PowerApps for Office 365 license has limitations
in the capabilities which are available to users. PowerApps also provides higher level
licenses, named Plan 1 and Plan 2:
- PowerApps Plan 1 provides access to the Common
Data Service for Apps to store and manage data in additional environments. Users can run canvas apps that
are built on the Common Data Service for Apps, use premium connectors, access
data in custom applications or on-premises data.
- PowerApps Plan 2 allows users to run
model-driven apps with code plug-ins and real-time workflows.
For more information on PowerApps license plans please refer
to the Microsoft article
here.
