Welcome to this week’s FormAssembly updates.

Form Builder Update

This week’s other big update is in the Form Builder. We’ve redesigned the buttons for selecting question types with the hope of making them easier to see and understand. Many users had particular questions about the file upload button, so we changed the icon to make this selection clearer. We also added labels to each answer type option for clarity’s sake.

New Answer Type Buttons

More HTTP POST Connector Updates

Expanding on last week’s improvements to the HTTP POST connector, this week we made that connector available in interactive mode. Previously, the connector could only be run in background mode, meaning that the result of the POST connector would never impact form submission or be available to the user. In contrast, interactive mode enables the connector to run before the user is redirected to the “Thank You” page. Submitted data can be shown to the user, either in an auto-responder email or on the “Thank You” page, and it can also be used in email notifications of submissions. To use the data from the POST connector in an auto-responder, email notification, or on the “Thank You” page, use the %%TFA_POST%% alias.

Coming Soon: New “My Forms” Page

We’re redesigning the “My Forms” tab to make it easier and faster to navigate through the different steps of creating and configuring your web forms.

The form you are currently working on will always be listed at the top of the list. You will also be able to open or collapse categories to keep your list to a manageable size, and you can conveniently access all the different configuration pages and actions from a drop-down menu. The drop down menu is located at the end of each row in the Active tab. From here you will be able to view, publish, edit, and configure your form, as well as copy it into the Form Builder, archive, or delete it. We hope this will streamline your use of FormAssembly and help you be more efficient.

We expect to release this update within the next week or so.

As always, we really appreciate your thoughts and comments. Feel free to leave comments below this post, and suggestions can be entered at the User Voice forum.

In an effort to keep you up-to-date and informed on what’s going on at FormAssembly, we’re going to start posting a summary of updates every week. For our first installment, here’s the rundown of what we’ve been doing around here this week.

Additional prefilling options including POST support
We’ve updated the form prefilling capabilities to be more robust and versatile. Most importantly, prefilling now supports POST requests. POST requests are useful when prefilling with a link parameter is not possible, such as when you have too much data or when you would like data to remain confidential. For more information on implementing POST requests for prefilling your forms, see the help documentation.

New Languages
Bahasa Melayu (Malay) and Lietuvių (Lithuanian) are now supported on FormAssembly.com. As always, we rely on your expertise to help translate FormAssembly and make it available for others around the world. If you are fluent in either of these languages, or any of the other languages supported on FormAssembly, you can contribute translations here.

Updated Documentation: Sorting exported data in Excel
If you’ve used repeated fields in your forms and then exported your data to Excel, you may have noticed that sorting (by last name, for example) causes all the repeated sections to appear together at the bottom of the spreadsheet. The relationship between the repeated rows and the “master” rows is lost, making the data difficult to use. While there is no perfect solution for this problem, we have documented a workaround that will enable you to use your data with minimal extra work. You can read about the workaround and watch a two minute screencast here.

“Fullscreen” in AppExchange
For AppExchange users, we’ve added a fullscreen link so that you can have more room to work on your forms from your Salesforce account. Simply click the link to open FormAssembly in a larger window. This will make your forms easier to use, edit, and view.

We hope you find some or all of these updates helpful. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Leave comments here, and make suggestions over at the UserVoice forum.

Today we added a custom Google search engine to FormAssembly’s help and support documentation. The search engine automatically searches all of FormAssembly’s online documentation, including the help section, FAQs, customer forum, and the UserVoice feedback forum.

While our goal is to create an application that is easy enough to use that you won’t need the help section, sometimes the fastest way to accomplish your goals is to check out the documentation. The search will enable you to take advantage not only of the documentation we’ve written, but also the collective knowledge in the customer forum and on UserVoice. As always, if you can’t find the answers you need, we’re available by email if you submit a support request.

We welcome any feedback you have on search or FormAssembly in general. Feel free to leave comments!

In order to keep you updated on Form Assembly and make sure you get the most out of the service, we’ve added some new ways for you to stay connected.

New Notification Option

We’ve added a third notification option in “My Account” Preferences. You can now choose to receive notifications of problems with FormAssembly (such as any downtime) and any processing problems with your forms. This may be especially useful for Salesforce users, as it will notify you when your Salesforce password expires. The notification will allow you to immediately reset your password and resume processing of your forms.

This notification option is off by default, but you can turn it on at any time by going to the “My Account” tab and selecting the Preferences tab.

Salesforce Connector Log Update

We’ve also updated the Salesforce Connector log to give you additional information about responses that fail for any reason. You can now click the “View Response” next to a failed response and, if needed, edit it. Once the source of the error has been addressed, simply click the “Resend” button to send the response to Salesforce.

We hope you’ll find this new feature helpful and that it will improve your experience with Form Assembly.

Based on feedback from the user experience survey we blogged about last week and the UserVoice forum, we’re rolling out a new version of the Form Builder.

Usability and Appearance Updates

You’ll probably notice that we’ve updated the look of the application and added a new button on the toolbar: “New Page.” The multi-page functionality has always been there, but we made it easier to use. This will enable you to quickly add new pages to your form.

The Outline and Properties tabs have been fine-tuned to be easier to use in a number of small but important ways. In addition, if you would like to keep the preview visible when editing your form, you can now check the “show only one tab at a time” box.

Default Selection for Multiple Choice Questions

One oft-requested feature that we’ve implemented is the ability to define a default choice in a multiple choice list. You’ll now see a checkbox or radio button–depending on the type of multiple choice list you’re making–that allows you to denote one or more selections as the default.

Custom Predefined Elements

If you have sections that you want use on multiple forms, you may find the ability to create and save your own predefined elements helpful. To do this, simply create the section you use frequently and in the “predefined element…” dropdown list, select “Create new from selection.” You can delete and edit custom sections by selecting “Manage predefined elements” from the same dropdown. The new predefined element will then be available for use in other forms.

Custom Validation and Error Messages

Many of you asked about adding the ability to change the error messages that appear when a respondent does not enter an answer into a required field or enters an answer in the wrong format. You can now use regular expressions to define the correct format for a free-text response and the message you would like your respondent to see. To learn about regular expressions, click here.

Thanks for all your input via the survey and the UserVoice forum. We’ve got more updates in the pipeline, so check back in the next few weeks.

If you signed up to receive emails about providing feedback to FormAssembly, you should have seen an email about our first Customer Experience Survey about a week and a half ago.

We really appreciate the time many of you took to complete the survey. Your comments will guide important upcoming improvements to the application. We were excited to see how many of our users provided constructive criticism so we can make FormAssembly a better product for your needs.

If you haven’t taken the survey but have something to say, click here to fill it out now. We’ll continue taking responses for the next week.

Keep your eyes open for future surveys, as we’re hoping to get your opinions periodically. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can always submit feature requests via the UserVoice forum.

We have a small update for our Salesforce customers. If you are using FormAssembly for AppExchange, you may now upgrade to the latest release.

What’s new:

This update ensures that access to your FormAssembly data is done over an encrypted connection (SSL) only. This eliminates an annoying warning for Internet Explorer users about the presence of mixed secure/unsecure content on the page.

How to Upgrade:

If you are the Salesforce administrator for your organization, go to our AppExchange listing, click the ‘Get It Now’ button and follow the instructions.  You do not need to uninstall FormAssembly for AppExchange first, your package will simply be updated.  No data will be modified or deleted.

If you have any question or suggestion regarding this update, please leave a comment below, or email us.

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.

UPDATE (6:45pm): Service is gradually becoming available to all affected regions. We have switched to a different DNS service provider to circumvent the current instability with Softlayer DNS servers.

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FormAssembly.com is currently affected by a DNS outage at our hosting facility (Softlayer.com).

Access to our service has been intermitently unavailable from some locations throughout the morning.

Our monitoring service is reporting 14mn of downtime in the last 24 hours, but some users may have been affected for a much longer time.

We do not have an ETA for a complete resolution at this time.  We’ll update this post as new information is available.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and working diligently to get this issue resolved.

We’ve just posted three new tutorials to help you get acquainted with and use the Form Builder more effectively.

The Introduction tutorial is a basic overview of the Form Builder. This will be helpful if you are new to the Form Builder or need a refresher course. This tutorial covers the basic elements of the Form Builder (toolbar, preview pane, Outline, Properties panel and Advanced panel).

The Grid Layout tutorial describes how to effectively use the grid (table) layout in your forms. Grid layouts are especially helpful when you need to collect multiple pieces of related information. Questions are displayed in a single row. The tutorial also demonstrates how to create a repeatable section or question.

The Conditional and Calculated Questions shows how to create a question that only appears when users select a specific answer to a preceding question. Conditional questions can keep your form from being needlessly long and confusing by hiding questions that are irrelevant to certain respondents. This tutorial also shows how to create questions that calculate a numeric total; for instance, that calculate the cost of club membership.

We hope you find these tutorials helpful and that they make your experience at FormAssembly.com more enjoyable.  We would love to hear your feedback on these tutorials and any ideas you have about tutorials you’d like to see in the future.