Case Study: City University of London

City University London is a well-respected institution located in the heart of London.With courses and programs ranging from short-term, part-time studies to full postgraduate degrees, the University serves a broad audience of over 21,000 students from the UK and abroad.

Early in 2007, Dan Jackson, head of the university’s web team, was looking to change the way the institution managed web forms. After checking out different hosted services and software solutions, Dan opted for FormAssembly and became the first customer of our (retired) On-Site Edition.

Dan made his choice based on three key criteria:

  1. They needed to provide non-technical authors a way to create feature-rich web forms.
  2. They wanted full control over their data,
  3. They needed a solution that would actually free up time for the web team.

Since adoption, Dan Jackson says FormAssembly has become “an indispensable application” for the university. Hundreds of web forms are processed securely and reliably every day and just about every department is involved, from alumni relations, to campus security, student admission, HR, IT and more.

On any given day, a new web form can be created to handle registrations for an open-day event, to collect feedback on a lecture, or to process access requests for a particular IT service. And these are just a few examples of how City University London is putting FormAssembly On-Site to good use.

dan_jackson
Dan Jackson, Web Services Team Leader, City University London

Here’s a short extract of a Q&A session that Dan Jackson graciously agreed to share with us.

What do you like most about the product?

First, it’s freed up our web team for other development work.

Second, that all the forms are processed through a single, secure script.

Third, we’re not reliant on a 3rd-party hosting the service and our respondents’ data.

Fourth, the “connectors” feature has allowed us to integrate FormAssembly with numerous 3rd-party applications and services.

How many people do you have using the application?

We have a small handful of admin users and about 30-40 editors.
We have an additional number of users who have “read-only” access to response data for small sub-sets of forms.

Do the people that use FormAssembly On-Site find it easy to use?

Yes, we offer our staff two-hour training sessions that usually prove sufficient insofar as we don’t get many requests for further support or clarification.

Do you find yourself using FormAssembly more, less, or pretty much as expected?

Much, much more.

Would you purchase FormAssembly On-Site again if you could do it all over again?

Absolutely.

Don’t just collect data

— leverage it.