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guyinazo's avatar
guyinazo
Copper Contributor
Jan 24, 2022

Basic Forms usage question

I know this is a basic question, but we are trying to figure out the best architecture to go with on this project.  We have a complaint form online (public-facing) that is currently a fillable pdf file.  We want to take that and save data to a back-end database, even if it is a SharePoint list or data verse, and kick off a power automate workflow.  Can a form created in MS Forms be public-facing?  Users do not have to be logged in and can be anonymous.  Another thought is creating a Power Portal application, but I dont want to overkill the technology for this simple complaint form.  Thanks for the information

  • RobElliott's avatar
    RobElliott
    Silver Contributor

    guyinazo yes a Forms form can be public-facing, just change the settings on the form to Anyone can respond. That will make the form completely anonymous, so if you later think you might want to respond to people who completed it then you'll need questions for their name and email adress.

     

    It is always best practice to use a flow in Power Automate to automatically grab each response as it comes in and save it to a list in SharePoint or to a separate excel file. This gets over so many of the issues reported here on the forum (both those caused by Forms and form owner mistakes). A very simple example of such a flow is below:

     

     

    You can then either have follow-on actions, for example we generally do personalised emails back to the submitter which is one of the reasons for the Office 365 Users get user profile (v2) action. Or you could have another flow that gets triggered when the new item in the list is created.

     

    If your form submitters are external then you don't really need or would want to create a Power App as there woulod be quite high additional licencing costs to pay for Power Apps Portal..

     

    Rob
    Los Gallardos
    Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

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