FormSpring Blog

Out of Office Friday, July 3rd

ade — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:07:39 +0000

Just a quick head’s up that the FormSpring office will be closed on Friday, July 3rd as we celebrate Independence Day.

If you have any questions, please send us a message or leave a voicemail at 800.845.6697. We’ll try to respond as soon as possible Monday morning. Have a great weekend!

FormSpring University Launches

chris — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:42:35 +0000

We have been kicking around ideas on how we could empower all of you with the skills and tools you need to build the best forms you can. Out of the brainstorming we’ve created FormSpring University. FormSpring University will serve as a platform for us to deliver educational tools and resources that you can use to learn to incorporate FormSpring into your organization.

The first iteration of this concept is going to be a bi-weekly webinar that will cover the basics of FormSpring. In the 30-45 minute webinar we will walk users through

Accessing your account setting and changing your profile
Building a basic form
Integrating your form with your website
Accessing, using, and exporting data
Building and implementing style templates

You can register for the first webinar on July 17th at 12:00 PM (Eastern) or you can also submit questions to the next webinar by accessing our webinar question form.

We will continue to build out www.FormSpring.com/University with video tutorials, advanced webinars and much more to help further your form building education.

Unique Checkboxes, Radio Buttons and Select Lists

ryan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:33:40 +0000

Recently, we added a new feature to checkbox, radio button, and select list fields that allows you to make these fields unique. There are many practical uses for this.

For example, say you have 50 seats available for a charity dinner. You could make a checkbox field with all of the seat numbers on it, letting users purchase one or more seats (use a select list or radio button field if you want to limit them to one seat instead of letting them choose multiple seats). Each time the form is submitted, any seats selected will be removed from the list. This prevents the same seat from being reserved by two different users.

To use this feature, add a checkbox, radio button, or select list to your form as you normally would, using the Add Field button. Then click the Unique checkbox for that field. Now each selection made from that field when the user fills out the form will be removed. When no options are left on the form, if that field is required, then no one will able to submit to the form. If you go into your data and delete a submission, the options selected for that submission will be added back to your form.

This feature will be useful for those selling a set number of an item, taking a set number of reservations, etc. and wanting to close the form after all items have been selected.

Limiting Form Entries

chris — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:27:37 +0000

When creating event registration forms or contest and promotion forms you may need a way to limit the number of submissions you recieve. We have written about this before but it helps to get a refresher on some of our “hidden” features that sometimes aren’t always obvious when building your forms.

You can limit the number of sumbissions in two ways. You can disable a form by limiting the number of submissions or by closing the form on a certain date or time.

So for instance if you have an event that can only handle 200 people you can go into your form’s settings, in the General tab you can select to “Disable this form after number of submissions” and enter “200″

The second way to limit your form submissions is to just deactivate the form on a certain day and time. Again in the General Settings tab instead of selecting “After number of submissions” you can select “Disable this form on date” and enter the date you want. You can enter a certain date and time, for example 6/26/2009 8PM or you can enter 2 weeks from now, two months from now or something similar and it will work the same way. This is perfect if you want to hold contests or special promotions that are time sensitive and need to be cut off at a certain date or time.

You can also customize the message that users will see if they go to the form after it has been closed for submissions.

Let us know in the comments below any other ways you might be using the Form Deactivation settings or any other form building tips and tricks you may have.

Adding Form Field Variables to E-mail Subject Lines

ryan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:05:28 +0000

Recently I wrote a blog post on How to Add Field Variables to Confirmation & Notification E-mails. One thing I forgot to mention is that you can also add these variables to the subject line of those e-mails the same way.

You can read my previous post on adding form field variables to e-mails, and then do the exact same thing to add them to the subject line of your confirmation/notification e-mails.

For example, say you were collecting “Name” on your form and wanted to pass on the user’s name to the subject line of the confirmation or notification e-mail you send out. You could do that by cutting and pasting the number code for that field as I did in the image above.

This is one of those “hidden” features of FormSpring that not everyone will need but we had many requests for it and added it in a recent update. If you have questions regarding this or any other features feel free to contact our support team.

June 21st Maintenance Notice

chris — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:07:10 +0000

We will be migrating the FormSpring site and application to a new hosting platform on Sunday, June 21st from 1:00am – 2:00am Eastern time. During this window we expect less than 5 minutes of actual downtime. With any downtime a maintenance message will be displayed when viewing a form or using the application.

Some Background

We’ve been on our current cluster of servers for a little over a year, but as we’ve continued to grow we see a need to preemptively expand the hosting architecture to accommodate future growth and employ additional high-availability technology.

A few weeks ago we attempted a migration that resulted in unexpected performance issues leading to a two-hour outage, ultimately causing us to revert back to our old servers. We’ve since started fresh with a new data center, new servers, and very different infrastructure.

We feel very confident that this migration will be a success. We’ve assaulted the servers with a battery of new tests to try to pinpoint any potential performance issues and have found the new infrastructure gives us a minimum of 3x more capacity than we have today.

What do I need to do?

In short, nothing. The migration will be very much behind-the-scenes, and you shouldn’t notice anything different in the new environment.

However, there are a couple things you should look out for. These issues are only applicable to a few people so if none of this seems familiar, you can safely ignore this.

If you’ve hard-coded FormSpring’s IP addresses in your computer’s hosts file or a router, please remove these entries. It’s important to use our normal DNS servers to obtain IP addresses in real-time.
Similarly, if you’ve white-listed FormSpring’s IP addresses in your mail server, please remove these entries and white-list messages coming from any formspring.com server. Messages may come from one of several servers whose IP addresses are subject to change without notice!

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about the migration. We will be updating our blog and Twitter stream once the migration is complete or with any additional information.

UPDATE 6/21 1:30am – The maintenance went smoothly and we’re up on the new environment. If you experience any issues please file a support request.

Using Multiple Payment Processors on an Order Form

ryan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:20:14 +0000

You can use one payment option, such as PayPal, on your order form, or you can use two or more payment options. Each payment option will need to be set up separately under Settings > Payment Integration.

When using multiple payment options on a form, you will need use Smart Routing on your Submit Actions.

For example, say you wanted to offer all four current payment options on a single form. One way to do this would be to create a select list on your form called “Choose a payment method” with four choices: PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net and First Data.

For your smart routing rules, you would set the PayPal Submit Action to redirect the user to PayPal if they pick PayPal from the “Payment method” select list, you would edit the Google Checkout Submit Action to redirect them to Google Checkout if they chose that option from the select list, and you would do the same for the other two payment options. You set this up under Settings > E-mail & Redirects > After the Form is Submitted.

Group Projects and Data Entry

john — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:38:18 +0000

It’s common for small work groups to need to collect data for projects. And most of the time, data needs to be collected and stored in a consistent manner so that it can be analyzed or included in another project or imported into another application. Data integrity is usually very important. For more than a decade, the default tool for this task has been the spreadsheet. And I am a big fan of the spreadsheet, don’t get me wrong. But there is a better way.

Using FormSpring’s drag and drop form builder, team members can quickly build a structured form for data collection, circulate the link to team mates and data can be entered in a way that is easy, consistent and most importantly eliminates the pesky challenges associated with the question — “do you have the most current copy of the spreadsheet?”

With FormSpring, data is stored in a database which is download-able into common productivity apps like Excel and Word. No need to worry about who has the most recent copy of the spreadsheet because all data resides in the FormSpring database.

And if you are entering data repetitively, you simply use the use the custom redirect in the emails and redirects area in the settings tab to redirect the form itself upon submission.

So when you save the form, it publishes data to the database and jumps right back to the form so you can enter another submission.

If you have questions on this or any other FormSpring uses, please contact us.

FormSpring As A Simple CRM Tool

chris — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:45:05 +0000

Support requests are always a great asset for us at FormSpring, they shed light on user problems but also give us an interesting look at how our form builder can be used outside of just an online form tool.

Someone recently inquired if FormSpring had a way to act as a simple CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tool. In fact there is an easy way to use your form data and the online database as a simple CRM solution. While we wouldn’t suggest this as an alternate to Salesforce, High Rise, or other industry leading tools, it is perfect if you are a small organization that needs to keep track of leads, sales calls or other customer data in one central place.

The first step in creating a simple CRM solution is by adding a hidden field in your form. For instance if you have built a simple contact or lead generation form you can add a hidden Long Answer field titled “Follow Up Notes” to your form

Then as customers or potential leads submit their information you can go back into the FormSpring database and view their submissions. You can click on any submission and Edit that submission quickly.

You can then add notes in the hidden field you created and monitor that lead throughout a sales process, a customer service inquiry or other touch points.

You can hide any field so you could even put in date fields, file upload fields to attach documents to a lead, and other fields to create a more complete tracking system. While it is a basic solution to the more advanced CRM systems, for small and medium organzations this is an effective short-term solution.

How to Add Field Variables to Confirmation & Notification E-Mails

ryan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:28:13 +0000

The default notification e-mail is great, as it includes the submitted data for all form fields, but sometimes you might not want to e-mail all of that info to everyone. Say you send out two notification e-mails for your order form. One goes to sales so that they can log contact details of the submitter and contact them in the future. The other e-mail goes to receiving and needs to contain more details about the order than what sales needs. You can create two different custom e-mails, one containing just the submitted contact details that goes to sales and the second that contains the contact and order info that goes to receiving.

Another common situation that requires a custom e-mail is when you are collecting sensitive information on your form, such as credit card numbers. Unless you are using PGP, you shouldn’t be e-mailing credit card numbers to yourself, since e-mail is not a secure method of transmitting sensitive data. Instead, you can either send a link to your data in your notification e-mail, or you can build a custom notification e-mail that includes all fields except for the credit card field.

So how do you include form field data in a notification or confirmation e-mail? It’s really quite simple. Inside of a notification e-mail, click the radio button for “custom message” or simply create a confirmation e-mail, as confirmation e-mails are custom by default. Next, you will want to scroll down to where it says “Insert Fields” and you will find a list of all the fields on your form. Click on one of those links to insert the data from that field into your e-mail.

Say we have an order form and are collecting name, address, quantity, item, and cost. We could draft a confirmation e-mail to the user that says something like:

Dear ,

Thank you for ordering of our for a total cost of .

To do this, click on the name of the field you want to insert when creating your e-mail, and the field ID number for that field will be inserted into your e-mail. This will look something like this:

Dear {$6423110},

Thank you for ordering {$6423115} of our {$6423114} for a total cost of {$6423116}.

Those field ID numbers will be replaced when the e-mail is sent out by FormSpring with the actual info the user submits to your form, so the final result will look like this:

Dear John,

Thank you for ordering 5 of our t-shirts for a total cost of $100.

This is just one short example, as the possibilities for creating custom notification and confirmation e-mails are endless.

FormSpring Blog

Out of Office Friday, July 3rd

Other Interesting Posts

FormSpring University Launches

Other Related Posts

Unique Checkboxes, Radio Buttons and Select Lists

Other Related Posts

Limiting Form Entries

Other Related Posts

Adding Form Field Variables to E-mail Subject Lines

Other Related Posts

June 21st Maintenance Notice

Some Background

What do I need to do?

Other Interesting Posts

Using Multiple Payment Processors on an Order Form

Other Related Posts

Group Projects and Data Entry

Other Related Posts

FormSpring As A Simple CRM Tool

Other Related Posts

How to Add Field Variables to Confirmation & Notification E-Mails

Other Related Posts