Forum Discussion
What happens when Forms owner leaves the company?
Hi,
One of the MS Forms Survey owner is going to leave the company but that survey is active i.e. people are updating the survey using Collaborate link. So in this case, what is going to happen? Will this survey be totally lost since the owner of the survey will not be available anymore?
-Prashant.
My understanding is, as of right now, the form is owned by that user and there is no way to move it to another user. Once the account is deleted so is the form. In this case the user can download the results for history. There is an option in the form sharing that can give a link to recreate the form from a template (Share As a Template).
Form Sharing
You can then use this link to recreate the form in a Group or on a SharePoint site. If you do this the new form link will need to be communicated, but the original will be deleted when the account is deleted. I mentioned this to the forms team as a missing Admin feature, not sure where they are at with allowing Admins to move/reassign ownership of a form. Hope this helps.
prashantguptag Having that issue right now. I trained folks to share the edit link with someone else (in case you win the lottery), but someone didn't listen...now we lost all the data and have to redo.
I think this part of a blog post on new features being released or worked on will answer the question.
"Greater administrative flexibility
We’ve added several improved administrative capabilities to make managing Forms easier. One of these is ownership transfer, which enables form owners to transfer their form to an Office 365 Group. Once transferred, the form becomes part of that group, is shown in its own tab, and can be managed by any group member. Additionally, administrators will be able to use eDiscovery in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center to identify and export content found in Forms. (This feature is in development and will be available for all customers soon). Finally, since Forms is part of the Microsoft 365 family, it is compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."Hello Jeffrey Allen,
Is there also some plan to add/create some admin portal for Forms to be managed by some (global admin) role within tenant? I see the scenario that there can be created many Forms by almost anyone within tenant and if such owner will not transfer this Form to group there is totally lost track of such form. There should be some lets say golden ticket that will allow admins to see all Forms and manage its ownership or lifecycle.
As such Forms are ment to be replacement of traditional surveys in SharePoint, there you as site admin were able to delete/manage such created surveys.
Thank you in advance for answer.
P.
- I am running into this question with my organization now. Does anyone have an updated answer or is the answer still the same: When a user leaves the company, the form is deleted.
I have the same question. I found no official information about a retention period or Forms lifecycle. Based on UserVoice Ownership transfer is not yet possible.
I tested some scenarios with a test account. 3 Forms, 2 of them are shared. I have deleted the account, all 3 Forms are still available and users can add responses. But how long?
- 1st Form, a personal form, not shared, still available. In a technical perspective it's now an orphaned Form.
- 2nd and 3rd Form, a personal form shared with a colleague, still available.
With the introduced Group Forms it's the same question, what happens with the Forms after a group is deleted?
Hello,
I've run into this problem now. A temp created a form for a team to send to gain feedback. The temp left over 30 days ago and now the team have told me they can no longer access the form or it's data.
It'd be pretty irritating to have to recreate the Form and it'd be a major headache and loss if we can no longer access this data.
Any suggestions and how do we avoid this in future - creating forms through System Admin doesn't seem the most healthy?
I believe they can share the form with someone else, others can see the responses: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Share-a-form-to-collaborate-d5bb5cf0-8401-4c15-bb8c-8e108cd7e69b
However forms is largely individual at this point which is a problem in this exact scenario.So even though owner's account is disabled/deleted, the survey will continue to exist and other users can still collaborate?
My understanding is, as of right now, the form is owned by that user and there is no way to move it to another user. Once the account is deleted so is the form. In this case the user can download the results for history. There is an option in the form sharing that can give a link to recreate the form from a template (Share As a Template).
Form Sharing
You can then use this link to recreate the form in a Group or on a SharePoint site. If you do this the new form link will need to be communicated, but the original will be deleted when the account is deleted. I mentioned this to the forms team as a missing Admin feature, not sure where they are at with allowing Admins to move/reassign ownership of a form. Hope this helps.
