If you don’t have an account with us yet, you can go straight to our new site to discover our service and sign-up.

If you do have an account, first don’t worry. The change does not impact your account and your forms will continue to collect data as usual. If you want to learn how to take advantage of the new version, please check out our migration notice.

If you want to learn a bit more about the new FormAssembly.com, here are a few previous blog entries covering some of the new features:

• Overview of the new Form Builder
• New website integration options
  
• Improved response management
• Private beta announcement

There are many other new features not yet covered in our blog:

• Form versioning.
• Customizable auto-responders.
• Preview of response before final submit.
• Generic connector to automatically repost submitted data to any third-party server-side script.
• Enhanced Salesforce connector (web-to-lead, web-to-case, web-to-custom…).

The new version has a separate blog, please subscribe to the new feed if you want to be kept updated.

Looking forward seeing you on our new site!

The new FormAssembly.com proposes three different ways to setup the web forms you have created.

• HTML Integration: You place the form on your website by copying and pasting HTML code.
• Code Integration: You place the form on your site by copying and pasting server-side code.
• No Integration: You leave the form on FormAssembly.com

Each method has its benefits and drawbacks. The last method is the easiest but it offers limited customization options. The two other methods offer a seamless user experience and may be more appropriate if you have the technical skills needed.

The Form Submission Workflow

Filling out web forms is not always a single-step process. Several things may happen before a “thank-you” message can be displayed: invalid data may need to be corrected or a confirmation may be required. Each integration method handles these steps differently.

When using the code integration method, users can submit the form without ever leaving your site and statistics like drop-out rate are calculated accurately.

Setting this up is relatively easy. We provide the code and you just need to copy and paste it on a page of your site. It is nonetheless an ‘advanced’ feature that may not work for everyone. There are technical requirements that may not be met by your web host, and you may not be able to place the code in your page (especially if you are using a Content Management System or a blogging engine).

When using the HTML integration method, the users will stay within your site, unless invalid data is detected by our server or a confirmation is required. In this case, the user will be redirected to a neutral-looking page on formassembly.com, where (s)he will be able to complete the required step.

Contrary to the server-side code integration method, this method should work for everyone, as long as you know how to create or edit a web page on your site. We provide the HMTL source, and you can edit it (to a certain degree) to match your website design.

This is the default option for forms created with FormAssembly.com. There is absolutely no setup required so this is the easiest and fastest way to start collecting data with your web forms. The downside is that the form is hosted by us, so your users may be confused by the disconnect between your site and the form.

That’s it for today. Next week we’ll present the new Form Builder. It is certainly the centerpiece of the new FormAssembly.com, so stay tuned!

What is an incomplete response?

An incomplete response is a response that was submitted by the respondent, but for one reason or another, a final step was not completed successfully.

When using FormAssembly.com, there are four different situations where a response will be considered incomplete:

1. With the “Save & Resume” option enabled (which by the way is now optional), the respondent has saved the form, but has not yet come back to finalize it.
2. With the ‘Preview’ option enabled, the respondent has completed the form, but has not yet clicked the ‘confirm’ button on the preview page.
3. With the ‘Captcha’ option enabled, the respondent failed to correctly identify the letters and has not yet resubmitted the form.
4. The respondent submitted a form that did not pass the server-side validation and has not yet resubmitted the form with valid data.

The “incomplete” status can be temporary, since the respondent can still complete the required step to finalize the response. It can also be permanent, if the respondent has abandoned the form.

What can I do with incomplete responses?

The new FormAssembly includes a view to manage incomplete responses. Its purpose is to help you identify and reduce the number of abandoned responses.

It is quite common, for instance, to find a response saved and eventually abandoned because its author couldn’t remember the address or the password to resume the form. To mitigate this problem, we provide a couple of built-in tools to easily send reminders and reset passwords. But first, we added a way for your visitors to contact you when they need assistance.

Provide Assistance

At the bottom of each form there is a link, “Need assistance with this form?“, which leads to a page showing your public contact information. You can enter this information in the “Account” tab, when logged on your FormAssembly.com account. By providing an email address or a phone number, you will ensure that anyone who has difficulty filling out or resuming one of your forms will be able to contact you for assistance.

Send a Reminder

When you have identified a response that was saved by its author and not resumed within a reasonable time-frame, you can easily send a customized reminder in a couple of clicks.

Reset a Password

If one of your respondent has lost his/her password and is asking for your help, you can also send a new password very easily. The email and the new password are automatically generated.

Finalize the Response

You can also finalize the response yourself if you think that the data available is good enough and that the respondent is unlikely to come back.

That’s it for this introduction of one of the new features of FormAssembly.com. Remember, you can try the new version for free. The next post will present the new API, and show how it allows your visitors to go through the several steps of completing a form without leaving your site.

This time, it’s different. The new version of FormAssembly is a complete re-engineering of our service. It’s a new website, a new form management application, a new form builder and many new features born from our years of experience and the great feedback from our users.

The new version is currently in private beta. If you’d like to try it before anyone else, please let us know. If you currently have an account with us, you will have the opportunity to migrate your account, your forms and your responses to the new version. We will maintain both versions concurrently for as long as necessary.

What’s New:

New processing options:

• You can set up customizable auto-responders.
• Respondents can preview their response before submitting it.
• and more…

Improved response management:

• You can manage incomplete responses and send reminders.
• You can annotate and edit responses.

Extended multi-language support:

• The application itself is available in French and English.
• Forms are fully localizable in the 25+ currently supported languages.

Better integration with your site:

• You can easily add the form to your website using server-side code.
• A generic connector allows you to post data back to any third-party script.

Powerful forms:

• calculated fields,
• flexible layout options,
• form versioning,
• and more…

This week, I will start a series of posts presenting these new functionalities in more detail. It’s an exciting time for us and we hope you’ll enjoy the new FormAssembly!

Over the last two days we’ve been updating a few things here and there on the site. The most important change is the new layout for the data collected. Hopefully, it is now easier to read. It also addresses some issues we had in the past (such as the sometimes incorrect order of questions). This change is effective in the online report and in the email notifications (for both text and html formats).

Also, thanks to the contributions of Ameer Alshamali and Eduard Irimia, we can now serve web forms localized in Arabic (العربية) and Romanian (Română). These are the latest additions to the long list of languages already supported.

As always, your feedback is very much appreciated!

This means a few things. First, FormAssembly.com meets the high standards set by Salesforce and Symantec in terms of information security and operating policies. The certification process included a thorough review of our systems and required some significant upgrades on our part. All our customers are already benefiting from these “behind-the-scenes” improvements and we hope that new customers will feel more confident knowing that our service is backed by the biggest name in the software-on-demand industry.

The certification also means that our service is now available to all Salesforce customers on the Professional Edition (and above). For more information, check out the FormAssembly.com AppExchange listing.

We are going to roll out new features soon extending our integration with Salesforce. Check back often, or subscribe to our RSS feed to stay updated!

This is an opportunity for us to let you play with it, get your feedback and unearth any bug that may have slipped through.

Here are the new features and bug fixes:

• Improved form outline, with better handling of the drag & drop functionality and a new visual style that provides more information about questions and sections.
• The ‘duplicate’ option has been moved from the properties tab to the outline. Simply drag & drop the desired form elements to duplicate them.
• New questions and sections can now be inserted anywhere in the form by selecting first an existing item in the outline. The new element is inserted after the selection.
• You now get a warning if you try to leave the Form Builder without saving your web form (this feature is not supported in the Opera browser).
• Support for Opera 9.10 and Safari 2 (a few bugs remain in Safari).
• Fixed a bug that was gradually slowing down the application.
• Fixed a bug where the ‘required’ validation option had no effect when applied to sections.

The next version to the Form Builder will be a major update (v3.0) and should be available sometimes in late March. There are a number of nice functionalities coming, like calculation fields, improved conditional sections and fine control over the layout of the form.

As always, your feedback is very much appreciated, so feel free to leave a comment below or post in the forums.

The PayPal connector is only available on the Professional Plan so you might want to consider upgrading your account or registering if necessary (Note: you can request a free upgrade for the duration of the beta-test.)

For more information on the PayPal connector, please refer to the feature announcement post.

Is this service right for you?

There are no definite restrictions on what the form may contain or what you may sell with it, but this service is better suited for simple situations, where:

• You have a limited number of items to sell.
• Items have a fixed price and a fixed or variable quantity.
• Shipping & handling fees and taxes are applied to the total price.

Here are a few examples:

• Selling intangible goods such as music (mp3), software, e-books, …
• Charging a membership or an admission fee.
• Charging a flat fee for consulting services.
• Accepting donations.
• Selling physical goods, to the extent that inventory is not an issue.

If you are not sure if this service is adapted to your particular needs, feel free to contact the support.

Getting Started

The first step is to design your web form with the Form Builder. You will probably include a description of what you are selling, ask some information about the buyer (but you can leave the shipping address out because PayPal can handle it for you) and maybe let the buyer specify the quantity (s)he wishes to purchase.

You will find some templates in the Form Library, under the “Order Forms” section.

Once you have saved your form, you will be taken to the “Form Display & Processing Properties” page. The option that interests us today is in section 3, “Connector Setup”. Check the “PayPal” option, set the other options on this page as desired and save. You will be taken to the “PayPal Connector” setup page.

PayPal Account Information

Enter here the email address associated to your PayPal account. If you don’t have a PayPal account yet, you should create one now (PayPal accounts are free).

If you have a PayPal Personal account, you should consider upgrading to a Premier or Business account. This allows you to accept credit card payments.

What You Are Selling

This is where you can specify the list of items that you are selling with your web form. This information will be exported to PayPal and displayed in the buyer’s shopping cart.

The quantity is the only information here that can be provided by the buyer. The drop-down menu lists all the questions that are appearing in your form. Select the one that corresponds to this item’s quantity.

Use the “add another item” link if you have more than one item to sell.

Shipping Address

If you need a shipping address, you may let PayPal collect it for you. If your form is already asking for an address you should adjust the export setting so that the buyer doesn’t have to provide it twice.

Exporting the shipping address works like the item quantity setting. For each address field, select in the drop-down list the corresponding question in your web form.

Data Encryption

By default, the data transmitted to PayPal is not encrypted. This could allow a malicious customer to modify an item price or description before paying for it. This should not be a problem as long as you are checking every order before delivering the goods.

If you have a Premier or Business account, we can use a secure certificate to encrypt the data. This prevents the risk mentioned above and opens the possibility of automating the delivery process since no manual review of the order is necessary.

To create your secure certificate, follow the instructions on screen.

Please note that the actual payment occurs on PayPal’s website and is always securely encrypted. This particular setting only affects how we transmit the content of the shopping cart to PayPal.

Your “Pay Now” Page

This is the page that instructs your buyer to proceed to PayPal to finalize your payment. You can customize the text displayed on this page.

At this stage the form has been submitted and you have received the email notification. The response report on FormAssembly.com includes a payment status.

Payment Tracking

Once the buyer completes the payment, the payment status on your response report is updated:

The payment status is updated as well if a pending payment is cleared or if you issue a refund.

That’s it! We tried to keep it simple and self-explanatory but we’re sure we can still improve this feature, so any feedback, questions, or suggestions are welcomed.

This new feature is available only on the Professional Plan and will be in ‘beta’ until at least mid-January. If you would like to give it a try, we offer a free account upgrade for the duration of the beta-test.

The Paypal Connector allows you to collect payments with any web form created with our Form Builder. Order forms, registration forms, there are endless possibilities, but let’s consider one example:

Let’s say you wish to sell season tickets for a local community theater.

With the Form Builder you design your web form to collect the information you need from the buyers. For instance, their name, address, and the number of tickets they want to purchase. Once your form is ready, you set the price per ticket and enter some other PayPal related information.

Jane, a visitor to your website, finds your form and decides to order the tickets. She enters the requested information and submits the form.

She is now invited to finalize the payment on PayPal. There, she can review the content of her shopping cart (the number of tickets) and pay using her own PayPal account or a credit card.

You, or someone of your choosing, will receive an email notification, and the response detail on the FormAssembly.com website will contain the payment tracking information.

Here is an overview of the purchasing process, from the buyer’s perspective:

(click for a larger view)

Here is what you need to do to get this up and accepting payments using your web form:

Step 1. Create your order form. The Form Builder gives you the flexibility to collect all the information you need from your customers.

Step 2. Connect your form to your PayPal account. This is were you can define the price of the items you are selling with your form. The quantity of each item can be linked to one of your form fields to let your customers enter it. If you need to collect a shipping address, you can do so in your web form or alternatively, you can opt to let PayPal collect it for you.

Step 3. Place your form on your website, or simply link to that same form on FormAssembly.com

Step 4. Test it! PayPal allows you to refund payments at no cost.

As always, your feedback is important and I’m looking forward reading your suggestions!

First, to everyone who reported bugs, suggested improvements, provided feedback and simply put our service to test and adopted it.

To the users and the designers who provided templates and stylesheets and made it easier for others to get started.

To the developer community whose invaluable contribution has made the open-source libraries Freja and wForms better.

And finally, we are very grateful to those who took the time to provide translations. Thanks to them we can offer localized web forms in over 20 languages.

In no particular order, here are a few of them (with links when available). Thanks again!

Michael Duff, Nedjo Rogers, Henrique Recidive, Michael Bennet, Clemens Ender, John Gabel, sachinwfs, insipid, Daniel Serodio, Roderik van der Veer, Pablo Díaz, Vicente Russo Neto, Steffen Gransow, Domenico Testa, Anna Grau, Dries, Bojan Zivanovic, Faruk Nisanci, Peter A. Shevtsov, Eddy Chang, Kuba Mielczarek, Tobias Bæck, Pär Axelsson, Arno Esterhuizen, Martin Jon, BoB [the Mastor], Yotam, cat-walk, Troels Knak-Nielsen, Roman Baranovic, Zoltan Varady, Nyirfalvi Gyul, Jason Shore , Patrick, knave and Jeremy de Oliveira-Kumar.