Microsoft Forms Preview for Office 365 Business tenants - First Impressions

It's great to see that Microsoft has made the Forms product available to non-Educational tenants.  But now that many of us have it available in our toolbelt, questions started around its use and purpose and how it would play along with other related products.  Here's my initial thought on this topic.

Overview

Microsoft Forms is a cloud-based product that was created specifically for the education sector for managing surveys and quizzes.  Recently, a preview of the tool was rolled out to Office 365 Business tenants.  Using Forms, you can create surveys in minutes and share them with others to start collecting responses immediately. 

Today, there are only four types of questions available to be added to a Form - text, multiple choice, rating, and date. 

Like some more advanced survey solutions, Microsoft Forms lets you add branching for single-answer multiple choice questions.  Branching lets you build your forms such that questions that are irrelevant to a responder can be avoided. 

You also have the option to shuffle multiple choice questions (not that anyone would ever share the sequence of answers to their question :).

Education-specific Options

The Forms version available on Office 365 Education tenants contain several additional features that are more geared towards testing and evaluations.  A Quiz question option exists, which lets you specify which options are correct for multiple choice questions. 

Overall, at the survey level, you can apply specific settings that are typically used when creating tests or assessments, as noted below.

Two of the main appealing features I found are external sharing and mobile access.  The ease with which Forms can be shared with external users is important when trying to collect data from users who are not in my organization.  A good example of this is when I work with clients on satisfaction surveys.  In the past, these would be run through Excel Surveys or other applications that would require importing of the data into my tenant.  The second main feature is around the mobile accessibility.  Let's face it, when many of us receive a message about a survey, we usually try to do it outside of our core hours.  With the mobile-friendly interface, you can complete the surveys virtually anywhere and on any device.

Responses

Microsoft Forms provides you with real-time responses, which is great if you’re trying to use it to gather a specific number of responses, for example if you are running an adoption campaign. The Responses tab provides a summary that shows the number of responses for each multiple-choice

question, average score for ratings, and specific responses provided for text questions.

You can also export your Form responses into an Excel document for further analysis.

Accessing Data

One of the first questions that came to my mind was how easily I could interact with the surveys as they are being completed. Microsoft, it seems, anticipated this demand by introducing trigger in Flow that initiates a workflow when a new response is submitted. As Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Flow are both tied to the same tenant, you are able to simply select the specific Form from a drop-down list.

Once the trigger has been configured, additional actions can be added to leverage the submitted Form data.  More details on this integration is covered in Microsoft Forms and Flow - Leveraging Real-Time Survey Results in the Cloud.

 Conclusion

As a Preview release, Microsoft Forms looks promising for several reasons

• Easy to create surveys
• Collect responses from authenticated and anonymous users
• Surveys are accessible on mobile devices
• Survey data can easily be extracted into Excel and other systems