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:
A canvas app allows the app developer to layout supported controls wherever they wish on the page and construct multi-page applications.
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.
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.
It is not very difficult to appreciate and respect teachers, and especially when they ask you so much that there is not much time to complete all the work thanks to this site https://domyhomeworkfor.me/college-homework-help that makes any written work much easier to learn
ReplyDeleteNow a days data is everything if someone find the relevant data about you its mean that there is 95% chance that he or she will trust you, Professional Wikipedia experts are there to help you to get that trust
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDelhi escorts service is serving Luxury & Premium Call Girls at low prices. Call 9953430422 and hire Lusty Models with Escorts in Delhi 5 Star Hotels.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much in this article that I would never have thought of on my own. Your content gives readers things to think about in an interesting way. https://dynamichealthstaff.com/jobs-in-dubai-for-nurses
ReplyDeletewholesale transparent liquid concrete densifier
ReplyDelete"Thickeners belong to water-soluble polymers and can be divided into the following categories:
Water-soluble resins
Common resin thickeners include some varieties of polyvinyl alcohol, cellulose ether, water-soluble starch and so on.
Polyvinyl alcohol can be dissolved in hot water, only a few soluble in cold water, to use inconvenience, so rarely used.
Water-soluble starch, such as dextrin, is rarely used to make concrete thickening agent."
yhe bp doctor smartwatch Have a smart watch that you can use for exercise and daily life
ReplyDeleteblood pressure watch Keep your workout schedule fresh and invigorating. Create your own custom running, cycling, cardio or strength workouts, and download them to your watch. Then, your smartwatch will keep track of the exercises, reps, sets and rest time for you.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to find an accurate fitness tracker, just try this T10 smartwatch. It can track your data with multiple sports modes and get fast and easy access to data including: exercise duration, steps, calories, and more during the exercise.
ReplyDeletesmart watch,smart watches for men
Adopted advanced heart rate sensor, it can monitor your heart rate automatically all day(measured every 5 minutes). View your real-time heart rate data on the smartwatch directly
ReplyDeletebp doctor 3.0 pro wearable blood pressure smartwatch
Get the most out of your Wikipedia presence. We will help you claim your top spot in Google search results by ensuring that Wikipedia pages are clear, concise, well-written, and correctly categorized. For businesses, this is one of the best ways to increase visibility to your target market. Contact us right now to get wikipedia consulting from industry experts.
ReplyDeleteit will detect all the errors in your registry and safely remove them. Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required
ReplyDeleteThe 1956 French heist film Bob le flambeur includes a climactic sequence in which the protagonist begins playing as a heist is taking place. He encounters extraordinary luck enjoying in} chemin de fer, which leads him to lose track of time. Should the stakes of the punters exceed the quantity for the time being in the financial institution, the banker is not liable for the quantity of such extra. In the event of their dropping, the croupier pays the punters so as of rotation, as far as the funds in the financial institution will lengthen; past this, they haven't any declare. The banker could, nevertheless, in such a case, as a substitute of resting on his proper, 우리카지노 declare the stakes accepted, putting up the wanted funds to satisfy them.
ReplyDeleteHere you can find some best marble chess set / marble chess board / black and white marble chess set / onyx marble chess set and many more.
ReplyDeleteI would like more information about this, because it is very nice., Thanks for sharing Inventory management software
ReplyDeleteThank you for the informative introduction to Microsoft SharePoint! Your article provided valuable insights into its practical uses and features. Incorporating a keyword like "Marble Chess Set" into SharePoint workflows could add a creative touch to inventory management or product showcasing. Looking forward to exploring more about SharePoint's capabilities. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft Forms and Microsoft PowerApps offer versatile solutions for streamlining tasks and enhancing productivity. Whether it's gathering feedback or creating custom apps, these tools empower users to simplify complex processes. Meanwhile, Google Scholar Research Topics In Business provide invaluable insights, fostering innovation and informed decision-making in the business landscape.
ReplyDelete