Welcome to this week’s summary of FormAssembly updates. We’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work, but here are a few of the more visible updates we’ve made in the past week that we think you might be interested in.

Updates to PayPal Connector documentation

This week we posted documentation that should help you use PayPal with FormAssembly.com a little more easily. Here you can read about setting up the PayPal connector to work with your form, get an overview of the PayPal Purchasing Process, and find answers to the most common PayPal questions we encounter.

Coming Soon: Theme Editor

Providing you with a way to visually design your forms has been in the works for quite awhile, but we’ve made a significant progress lately on building a Theme Editor so you can modify your forms’ design without having to write CSS. The Theme Editor will allow you to modify almost all aspects of your forms’ visual design on the fly, and will also enable you to save themes for use on other forms.

For those of you who don’t want to mess with CSS styling, we think you’ll find this a useful and versatile tool. Below are a few preliminary screenshots. Some things may change, but the basic functionality should be set.

We love hearing your comments, so please leave them below or at the UserVoice forum.

If you’ve checked into your “My Account” section in the past week, you’ve probably noticed some changes there. In the first tab, called “Preferences”, you’ll see that you can let us know when (and if) you’d like to hear from us, and also decide if you’d like to use FormAssembly over an encrypted connection by default.

Communication Preferences

You have several options for receiving communication from FormAssembly. If you check the first checkbox, you’ll receive occasional emails about surveys to tell us how you use FormAssembly, what you like (and don’t like) about it, and what changes you’d like to see.

If you mark the second checkbox , you’ll receive very occasional newsletters as well as announcements about FormAssembly (including notification of any downtime and subsequent notification when we’re up and running again).

You can mark as many of these options as you like and you’ll automatically be subscribed or unsubscribed. We value your privacy and your time, so we’ll never share or sell your contact information with a third party. (See our privacy policy.)

Secure Browsing

The other option on this tab lets you choose to browse FormAssembly over a secured, encrypted connection. If your forms collect sensitive information that you intend to review while on FormAssembly, you may want to consider checking this box. Browsing with an encrypted connection will significantly lower the chances that someone else might be able see your information. However, browsing with an encrypted connection is considerably slower, so if you are not dealing with sensitive information, we recommend you do not check the box.

We hope you’ll take advantage of these new options and that they enhance your time on FormAssembly! As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts about these changes or anything else you’d like to see.

We have updated our terms of service and privacy policy statement to better reflect our long standing policy regarding the data we collect on your behalf.

Responses collected are yours. We do not claim ownership, we do not resell or data-mine them, and we don’t disclose them to any-third party without your express consent. *

Acute readers of our terms of service noticed that our previous terms were rather vague and open to interpretation on this question. This update includes the following corrections:

• Better definition of subscribers and user data (first paragraph) .
• User data explicitly left out of our copyright claim (section 2).
• New “Privacy and Confidentiality of Information” section (section 6).
• Rewritten “How Do We Use the Information That You Provide to Us?“  section in our privacy policy.

This notice is posted here and linked from the application. Your continued use of our service constitutes acceptance of those changes.

Please don’t hesitate to ask us if you have any questions regarding this update. Thank you!

(*) Unless of course if required by law.

We have two new improvements for you today.

1. Pop-Up Calendar

A pop-up calendar is now available to facilitate entry in date fields.  To enable it, open your form in the Form Builder, select the field and set the input validation to ‘date with calendar’. Click here for a demo.

The calendar is localized according to your language settings. At this time, we have translations for English, French, and Spanish. You can help us support your own language by submitting translations here.

2. Error-Free Form Attachments

Respondents have now a greater control over the file upload process. If the wrong file is submitted, the user can return to the form, delete the file and upload a new one as needed.

Note that the submission preview or the save&resume option must be enabled on your forms for this to work.

Here is a short screencast of this feature in action.

Feature Demonstration: File Upload
Screencast duration: 40s

These improvements were first suggested by our users, so keep sending us your feedback, here or on our forum. Thank you!

We are happy to announce a new release of the FormAssembly On-Site Edition (v1.11), our web form management solution for agile organizations.

We know that not all organizations can rely on a hosted service like FormAssembly.com to process their forms and collect their data. You may be bound by internal policies or you may have to comply with regulations, such as HIPAA. Perhaps you need enterprise-level support and deep integration with your information system.

This is why we designed  the FormAssembly On-Site Edition.

The On-Site Edition offers the same great web form building and processing capabilities enjoyed by our online users, while running on your own server and keeping your data safe and private.

This new release brings the On-Site Edition up to date with our online service, with support for scripted processing options, improved form rendering and several usability improvements.

To learn more about this product, please visit http://onsite.formassembly.com

In order to make your web forms look as good as possible right out of the box, we made a small change to the layout of forms hosted by FormAssembly.com.

Forms are now centered and their width has been reduced. Here’s a demonstration form using this new layout (it used to look like this).

To minimize any adverse effect to the layout of existing forms, this change only applies to forms created or modified since March 16th. This change also does not affect forms that are hosted on your site, unless the form is displayed through an inline frame.

If your form picked up the new layout but you need to keep the old one, please follow the instructions here. The code snippet you’ll need is the one named ‘Removing the default background on forms hosted directly on FormAssembly.com’.

Do you have any suggestion on how we could keep improving the look & feel of your form? We’d love to hear from you. Please post your ideas here, or on our UserVoice forum.

Thank you.

We just launched a separate site to report the service status of FormAssembly.com.

It’s status.formassembly.com

You can check the current availability of our service, see historical data on our uptime and access previous incident reports. The data is pulled in real-time from a third-party monitoring service (pingdom.com).

This is also the site you’ll need to visit to track updates if our service becomes unavailable. You may want to bookmark it now.

Thank you and happy St Patrick’s day!

We decided to experiment with a new forum on UserVoice.com.

This is a space where you can see what we are working on,  suggest new improvements and vote for the most helpful ideas.

You can access this forum and see the top voted ideas by clicking on the Support tab from your account.

We are constantly juggling priorities, having to decide between adding new features, streamlining and polishing others, or improving the infrastructure. All of that, of course, while provide the best customer support we can. Your feedback helps us make those decisions, and this forum hopefully will make it easier for you to be heard.

Even if you don’t have any suggestion at the moment, you can still cast your vote. So, check it out!

This is a short announcement for a minor update to the Salesforce connector.

Until now, the connector could only run in the ‘background‘. Meaning that your Salesforce organization would be updated only after the user had been redirected to the ‘thank-you’ page.

The problem with this approach was that validation rules set in Salesforce would be applied too late. Any error could only be silently logged for the administrator to review.

With the new ‘interactive‘ mode, the connector now attempts to create the Salesforce records before sending the user to the ‘thank-you’ page. If an error occurs, the user is notified and given a chance to correct the data and resubmit the form.

Both modes are available for the time being.  If you are not sure which mode to choose, use the interactive mode. We like to keep things simple, so we will eventually remove the background option (unless we end up finding a good use case for it).

We have a lot more updates coming, so stay tuned!

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!