FormAssembly vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

FA serves as the main platform for global students and staff to submit requests, with information sent to connected systems, primarily Salesforce. It is used by all current Oxford University students, not just those at SBS. Teams such as the CRM Team, Web Team, Entrepreneurship Centre, Goldman Sachs Team, and Programme Recruitment and BD teams use FA for various purposes, including degree programmes, open programmes, online programmes, and summer school. The MBA portal also uses FA. The system is user-friendly, easy to configure, supports branding, and incorporates business logic and rules, making it very helpful.

Incentivized

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

• Salesforce prefill is a powerful way to prefill forms with records from Salesforce and prevent duplicate data entry.
• Salesforce submission connector allows us to create some pretty complex and powerful logic to process form submissions into Salesforce data.
• General form prefill options via query strings in the URL is a helpful feature.
• The ability to use custom CSS and javascript on the page makes the forms very extensible and has been helpful to give us even more functionality.

Incentivized

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• we could always use more styling options when it comes to the form builder
• in our past use of the form builder when adding attachments to a form, there was an upload limit of 35MB. It would be great if this limit was increased.

Incentivized

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

FormAssembly continues to meet our needs, and the product functionality continues to grow, providing us with new opportunities to utilize the software. We've built many forms and associated processes on FormAssembly. It would require a large effort to migrate to another platform. We have invested a lot of time in learning FormAssembly.

Incentivized

FormAssembly is easy to get started with and very straightforward to use. It is easy to create forms, add questions and fields, and apply branding and logos. The data integrations are also robust, allowing us to pass information to Salesforce easily and quickly see when there is an error with the form in any way.

Incentivized

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

While it's not a true development package and misses some features like ingestion of external data for lists, etc... the product is fast, stable, easy to use, and will suit the needs of anyone needing online form functionality with SalesForce and other connectors available for your marketing needs.

Incentivized

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

I didn't participate in the implementation.

Incentivized

Form Assembly allows for advanced data mapping, pre-filling forms with Salesforce data, and working with custom objects. FormAssembly excels in Salesforce Integration, as it is highly specialized and deeply integrated. Often considered the industry leader for Salesforce forms, Formstack has strong integration, but may not offer the same level of granular control as FormAssembly.

Incentivized

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

• FormAssembly allows for us to take manual spreadsheet driven processes and standardize them in a scalable manner.
• FormAssembly allows for our customers to own a process of sales (print shipment allocations) that previously our reps were burden with.
• FormAssembly integrates well with our TechStack.

Incentivized

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.