When will Microsoft Forms be finalized

[Giovanni Lugo]

Hi All,

I was wondering if a microsoft employee could provide some color around when Forms will have a final version release? Also has there been an instance where something was put out in "release" state and then scrapped? My team is planning on developing a significant number of flows based off of form responses and we want to be certain we won't have to duplicate the effort in 6 months to a year.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Although in the IT world one can never be sure, Microsoft has a current focus of Cloud first, mobile first. All their efforts are focussed in this direction. All of their products which conform to this, I believe, are relatively safe for the long term, especially where there is no duplication or large overlap with another offering. Although there may be overlap between Forms and other offerings, Forms is the newer and more actively developed offering.

Microsoft has put a significant amount of effort into Forms. It has been around for a while now, but until recently, was only available to education tenants. Since around June 15, 2017 Forms is now also available to business tenants, noted as a preview. Microsoft is expanding Forms availability, therefore I don't think they are going to scrap it anytime soon.

[#3]

Hi Giovanni, thanks for the question. The Microsoft Forms Public Preview for commercial customers is being rolled out now to our Office 365 commercial subscribers. Forms has been generally available to education customers since August 2016. For general availability of Forms for commercial customers, at this time we expect this in calendar year 2017.

Microsoft Forms is a simple, lightweight tool that lets you easily create surveys, quizzes, and polls. It sounds like you might be creating business solutions, and you may want to check out SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow for scenarios like creating apps or business logic, or that integrate with data from other systems. https://products.office.com/en-us/business/business-process-automation

[#4]

I would approach this very cautiously. While Forms has been in use by the Education tenants for a while, there are many examples of significant changes occurring during Preview stages of other products. PowerApps, Flow, Teams and PowerBI all receive updates at least monthly and even though Forms is much simpler, being prepared for frequent changes should be included in your project planning efforts.

[#5]

Agreed @Dean_Gross. Changes such as Forms being available, turned on and licensed to users in a tenant, then mysteriously unavailable. I had it working, the tile was available. Now the tile has gone and I can't access it via the direct link to forms.microsoft.com. 

@John Toews, can you shed some light on the rollout? Is it being retracted from some tenants / regions? 

[#6]

Agreed @darell this kind of behavior is most unpleasant and strange!

[#7]

John Liu helped me discover the issue. If your tenant uses First Release for a select group rather than for the whole organisation, Forms Preview will be unavailable. I had turned on First Release for a select group to hurry the SharePoint Communications site rollout. This "turned off" the Forms Preview that was working in my tenant.

[#8]

Yes you figured it out, sorry about the confusion, we've only launched to "first release entire organization" tenancies.

[#9]

Has this changed already? My org is signed up to see applications in preview, but we don't have anyone in First Release and we just found access to Microsoft Forms today.

[#10]

There was an announcement a couple of hours a go "we're rolling out Microsoft Forms Public Preview to our Office 365 commercial subscribers.   Today, all commercial customers can visit http://forms.office.com to create surveys, polls or quizzes."   It also mentions the Forms tile is rolling out gradually and will take some time to appear in all commercial tenants.

So that probably explains why you are seeing this now! I assume this means the rollout is progressing, not just for first release customers.  It can be disabled as needed via licence assignment or removal in that case.

[#11]

Cian, you got it! We're moving beyond First Release Entire Organization now, into the rest of production. ALL licensed users can access https://forms.office.com now, and we'll roll out the app launcher tile gradually.

And indeed, you can configure access to Forms via user licenses, as you've been able to do since mid-June. We will not change any configuration you've made previously as we roll out.

[#12]

@John Toewscan we assume that future updates to Forms will be deployed throught the Select First Release process?

Is there a list somewhere that identifies which services will have features deployed throught the First Release process and which ones will not? i.e.,  i know that Yammer and Teams don't use it but this is just based on my own experience but there are many other services and I'm not sure about all of them. It would be helpful if this was documented somewhere.

[#13]

Thanks John for confirming this, glad I got it right.  

Now this has moved onto a wider release, does the means Forms is still in preview or what will it take to leave preview otherwise? Thanks!