2008 has been a great year for us at FormAssembly.com. Our service is used by more and more people worldwide, for causes big and small.

Just before the holidays, the Presidential Inauguration Committee chose us to process a large lead acquisition run. Earlier in the year, BP and Yahoo started using our service to facilitate internal business processes. But many more small businesses and individuals benefited as well, like Matthew from InvestmentMentor, who leveraged our Salesforce integration and saved thousands of dollars in development fees.

We take great pride in being useful to so many.

We have an ambitious plan for 2009, but we won’t forget our priorities:  providing the best user experience and customer service you can find. You can help us by posting your comments here or email us with your suggestions.

We thank you all for your business. If you happen to be on the Gregorian calendar,  happy new year and best wishes for 2009!

FormAssembly.com was unavailable for about 2 hours this morning, between 10:39 EST (15:39 GMT) and 10:59 EST (15:59 GMT) and again between 11:30 EST (16:30 EST) and 01:04 EST (17:04 GMT).

Our hosting provider first determined that a network equipment had crashed, causing our database server to be temporarily offline. We are still waiting for a complete report on the root cause of the network incident and extended downtime.

At this time the service is back to normal.

We are very sorry for the unexpected downtime and apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or comments regarding this incident.

Here’s an update on what we added to FormAssembly in the last couple months. We continue to work hard to make FormAssembly more useful and easier to use, so we hope you’ll enjoy these new features and keep sending us your feedback.

• Share your forms and data with other FormAssembly users.
• Personalize your “Thank-You” messages and emails with form data.
• Use dynamic redirection and messages.
• Export your uploaded files in one batch.
• Import a form from a Salesforce sandbox organization.
• Get better W3C standard compliance for your web forms.

Share your form and data (professional plan only):

This feature allows you to share your forms with your colleagues or customers. Permissions can be set on a form-by-form basis and allow access to the submitted responses and/or form editing.

For detailed instructions, go to:
http://app.formassembly.com/pages/support/share

Use formula-driven redirection and messages (professional plan only):

FormAssembly now includes a Excel-like formula engine. Formulas can be used to script the behavior of many form properties, like the address the visitor is redirected to, or the content of the emails.

For more information, visit our documentation:
http://app.formassembly.com/pages/support/formulas

Personalize your “Thank-You” messages and emails with form data (professional plan only) :

You can now reference any form field in the email or messages templates, using the Alias syntax. For instance, you could start your auto-responder with: Dear %%tfa_salutation%% %%tfa_lastname%%, ...

This will be translated to ‘Dear Mr. Smith,’ or ‘Dear Ms. John’ as the email is sent out.

The detailed instructions are here:
http://app.formassembly.com/pages/support/formulas/#aliases

Export your uploaded files in one batch (paying plans only):

You can now conveniently get all your files in one zip file. Go to the ‘Responses’ tab, then ‘Export’ and select the ‘Attachments’ option.

http://app.formassembly.com/pages/support/export

Import a form from a Salesforce sandbox (professional plan only) :

We extended the support for the Salesforce sandbox to the ‘import’ feature. Check the ’sandbox’ box when providing your credentials to import a form from a Salesforce sandbox organization.

W3C Standard-compliance improvement:

We fixed some validation issues with the markup generated by the Form Builder and added a clean up routine to make sure that the HTML you add to your forms remains valid.

That’s it for today.  There are still a lot of other things going on, so I hope to post another update before long.

I remember first stumbling on Luke Wroblewski’s writing a couple years ago during the early stages of FormAssembly. His insights on web forms design has been extremely valuable to us. I’m happy we can (modestly) return the favor by promoting his latest book, published earlier this year.

“In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms. ” - (excerpt from rosenfeldmedia.com)

To order a copy of “Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks”  and get 10% off, go to: http://rosenfeldmedia.com (Promo code FORMASSEMBLY).

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski’s book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

BTW, nice cover by Jason Kernevich.

EDIT: The maintenance is complete and operations are back to normal. Thank you for your patience!

We are improving our infrastructure and bringing a new database server online this Saturday (09/13/08) around 10pm EST (GMT-5).

There will be a 30 mn estimated downtime during which our service will not be available. We will provide a placeholder page to inform form users of the maintenance.

We know many of you rely heavily on our service and we take this responsibility very seriously.  We are working to minimize service disruption and continue to provide a web form solution that you can depend on.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

The FormAssembly  Team

Welcome to another entry in the FormAssembly product blog. The Salesforce connector, new localizations and a new help-desk are on the menu for this June update.

New Help-Desk System

We have rolled out a new support portal (powered by Helpspot) . To request assistance, go to the Support tab and open a new support ticket. You can track the progress on your tickets on that same page. Tickets are automatically updated as we exchange emails so you won’t have to wonder whether your email was lost or overlooked. On our end this also greatly facilitates our job as we work on your request.

Salesforce Connector Update

Sandbox Support:

You can now test FormAssembly for AppExchange with your Salesforce sandbox. When setting up your connector, check the ’sandbox account’ option and enter your API credentials. Once you are ready to switch to your live organization, you simply need to uncheck the box, update the credentials and you’re all set.

Optional Salesforce Triggers:

By default, a new record will trigger any assignment or email rule defined in Salesforce. You can now choose to turn off the rules on a form by form basis.

Completed Translations

Thanks to the generous contributions of our users, we have recently updated the Japanese, German and Russians translations to ensure that all our advanced features are properly localized for these languages.

Remember that you can help us support new languages by submitting translations.

That’s all for today. As always you are more than welcome to send us your comments, here, in our customer forum or by email.

One of most common questions we receive these days is “how can I download the form’s HTML code?”. This option has always been available, but it was somewhat buried behind a link in the ‘display & processing’ tab.

We decided to address this usability issue by providing a new tab called ‘Publish’. This tab contains all the information needed to start using your web form and this is the first thing you’ll see when you leave the Form Builder. The ‘Display & Processing’ tab has been renamed ‘Display Options’ and, without the publishing information, is now shorter.

We hope you’ll find this change helpful. Please feel free to comment on any usability issue you’ve encountered on FormAssembly.com.

Here’s a quick (and long overdue) update on the improvements we’ve been quietly pushing through in the last couple months.

Localization

We have taken great pride from the early days of FormAssembly.com in providing a multi-lingual service, with support for time zones, national character sets and localized forms in over 30 languages. Unfortunately, as we added new features, the number of untranslated texts has grown and translations are now incomplete for many of these languages.

To help us get back on tracks, we created a new localization page. If your language is not listed, or listed as incomplete, please submit your own translation. We would love to fully support as many languages as possible.

New Workflow feature

The idea behind this feature is to allow you to link several forms together, to be filled out in a predefined order. You could start, for instance, with a main application form and, depending on the answers given, follow up with a few supplementary forms.

This feature is still in its most basic form for now. We will be listening to your feedback to see where to take it. Note that this feature is available on the Professional plan only.

Form Builder Update

Customizable repeat link

If you are not familiar with the terminology, a repeatable section is a form field (or a group of form fields) that a respondent can duplicate to provide as many answers as needed. A good example is the employment history section of an online job application. One person might have just one previous job, while another may need to enter information for many different jobs.

When the ‘repeatable’ option is checked, FormAssembly automatically adds a link labeled ‘add another response’. The text of this link can now be easily customized in the Form Builder.

Bug fixes

We have also made several speed improvements and fixed a few bugs, some that occurred only with the latest release of the Safari browser.

Salesforce Connector Update

Better handling of repeated sections

You can now choose in the connector setup to either merge the data from a repeated section, or create multiple records. To explain this briefly, you could merge the repeatable employment history section of the example above into a single Salesforce field. A repeatable Attendee section on a registration form however can be more appropriately configured to create several Contact records, one for each individual.

Better control on dependent objects

When you create several Salesforce records from a single html form, the connector is usually able to determine how the records are related. For instance, if you create a new Case and a new Attachment, the connector will automatically link the Attachment record to the Case. This doesn’t work for all Salesforce objects though, so we added the new lookup mapping type to let you explicitly specify the relationship. We hope to enhance this feature to perform more complex lookup requests when creating or updating records in Salesforce.

That’s it for now. As always we welcome your feedback, either here using the commenting system or by email using the ‘Contact’ link above. Thank you!

If you looked at FormAssembly.com recently but decided that using a third-party service to manage your web forms wasn’t the right solution for you, we have some good news. FormAssembly On-Site is now available.

The On-Site edition offers the same great features enjoyed by thousands of our online users, but you can run it on your own server and keep your data safe and private.

To learn more about FormAssembly On-Site, go to:
http://onsite.formassembly.com

The new FormAssembly for AppExchange offers on-demand web form creation and data collection to Salesforce users.

Built on the latest version of FormAssembly.com, with its powerful Form Builder and plenty of incredible features, it lets you create or update any record in Salesforce with web forms. With a simple point&click interface you can create forms to capture new leads, update contacts, open cases, attach files, etc..

We are a Salesforce certified partner since January 2007. Salesforce features are available only in our Professional Plan for users with a Salesforce Unlimited, Enterprise or Professional Edition.

Here’s an overview of the latest improvements:

Work with any Salesforce Record

Our connector now works with any Salesforce object, including custom objects. It is aware of required fields, data types and object relationships. You can for instance create a Lead and link it to a Campaign (two different Salesforce objects), or create a Contact and add an Attachment, all with a single web-form.

Import a Form from Salesforce

Using the new import tool, it literally takes about 30 seconds to get a fully working web form that creates a new lead, case, or that custom object that took you so long to define in Salesforce.

Upsert Records in Salesforce

Upsert is a mechanism that allows you to insert or update a record in Salesforce based on a predefined key. This is how you can edit existing records or prevent duplicates. It’s as simple as checking a box in the connector set up to specify that you will be using, for instance, the record ID or an email address to uniquely identify the record.

Populate the Form with Salesforce Data

The counterpart of the upsert feature is the ability to populate your form with Salesforce data, from within your Salesforce account, using custom links or button. See our documentation for more information.

That’s it! Click here to visit our AppExchange listing and check out our test-drive!