Posts Tagged ‘form attachment’

How to Share a Form with Others

If you ever shared your password with a collaborator so they can download form attachments or view a report, read on. You should instead invite them to your account and share the form with them.

Create a user in your account for each collaborator in your organization
Create a sub-account for each user, don’t share your admin password with others

How Do I Invite Someone to My Account?

You invite others to join your account by creating a user for them. Once someone has joined your account, you can share a form with them and allow them to perform actions like:

To create a user, first add the person’s email address to the Settings tab of the form builder. Once they’ve verified their email, head to the user management dashboard of your account.

Enter the user’s first and last name, select their verified email address, and click Create User. We’ll email them to let them know they can now log in to FormSmarts, but we won’t give them their auto-generated password: please send it either by IM or voice call.User Management Dashboard

How Do I Share a Form With a User?

To share a form with a user, tap Edit Permissions in the Actions menu corresponding to the user, as shown on the screenshot above.

Select the form you want to share at the bottom of the Edit Permissions screen (shown below) and click Share.

Toggle permissions on/off as needed to allow the user to perform specific actions only.

Share Forms with a User and Set Permissions

How Can Users Sign In?

To sign in to your account, a users must select Log in as Invited User on the log in page and enter your Account Alias in addition to their email and password.

Your Account Alias uniquely identifies your account on FormSmarts. You need to create an account alias to allow users to log in.

Introducing the New Account Dashboard

A major refresh of the account section of the site introduces several new tools and capabilities:

  • Easily create sub-users and share forms with them with the User Management dashboard
  • Review activity in your account in the new Account Activity pane
  • Invited users now have their own account dashboard

User Management Dashboard

Contact Information

Many customers rely on FormSmarts to receive timely form notifications critical to their organization. Unfortunately, we’ve been in the past left without any ways to contact some members after all email addresses in their account bounced our emails.

The Contact Information panel of the account dashboard now allows you to set a secondary email address and mobile phone number we will use in situations were we are unable to contact you via the primary email address associated with your account (i.e. your login email).

To set a secondary email, select one of the verified email addresses in your account, or add a new email in the Settings Tab of the Form Builder, verify it, then go back to the account dashboard to set the new address as your secondary email.

If your organization gets its email service as part of a web hosting package, we recommend using your personal email (e.g. Gmail account) as a secondary email.

To set a phone number, enter your cell phone number including the international dialing code (e.g. +1, +44,…). FormSmarts will send you a text message with a code to verify your number. Enter the verification code in the space provided and tap Verify to verify your number, then Update Contact Info to save the new number.

User Management Dashboard

The User Management Dashboard illustrated above allows you to view and manage existing users in your account, create new ones, and change their permissions on individual forms.

Click the button showing a vertical ellipsis to access the Actions menu for the corresponding user.

You can:

  • Edit a user’s permissions on your forms and share new forms with them
  • Change the email address associated with a user
  • Reset a user’s password
  • Turn off a user’s two-factor authentication
  • Suspend a user
  • Permanently delete a user
Security Note: You can sign a user out and view their recent session history in the Account Activity panel.

Create a User

To create a new user, enter their name and select their email address in the list of verified emails in your account. If needed, click the button showing a plus sign to add and verify a new email address.

Click Create User button.

The newly created user doesn’t have any permissions on any of your forms but has implicit permissions. They can, for instance, submit Private Forms.

Share a Form with a User & Edit Form Permissions

Tap the Edit Permissions option in the Actions menu of a user to launch the User Permissions settings.

Share Forms with a User and Set Permissions

To allow a user to access submitted data for a form, first share the form with them: select (or search for) a form in the list and click Share.

FormSmarts will give the user the necessary permissions to view a single form entry online, download a copy in PDF, view uploaded documents (form attachments), and add notes and tags to a form entry.

You can adjust permissions to additionally authorize the user to edit a form submission and generate a spreadsheet with aggregated form responses.

Account Activity

The new Account Activity panel allows you to review and audit the session history of all users who have accessed your account in the last thirty days.

A separate table lists Administrator Sessions and User Sessions.

Sign a User Out

Should you suspect or become aware of an unauthorized access to your account while it is still taking place, you can immediately sign the user out and invalidate their session with the Log Out of Other Sessions and Log User Out buttons.

  • Click Log Out of Other Sessions to immediately invalidate all administrator sessions other than the one you are currently using
  • Select a user in the list of users with an active session and click Log User Out to immediately log them out

Invited User Dashboard

FormSmarts sub-users can also access the account dashboard to perform actions and view information relevant to them:

  • View a list of forms you’ve shared with them and actions you’ve allowed them to perform
  • Review their recent account activity to check no one else has accessed their account
  • Change their password
  • Set up two-factor authentication

Introducing Multi-User Accounts

FormSmarts supports accounts with multiple users, allowing an account owner to give invited users access to selected online forms.

Multiuser accounts with FormSmarts online form builder

How to Enable Multiple User Accounts

  1. Set up an account alias
  2. Create users
  3. Manage user permissions

Set Up an Account Alias

Before allowing sub-users to sign in to FormSmarts, you first need to set up an alias for your account. The alias must be unique and easy for users to memorize. A good choice is probably your organization or department’s name. Users will need to enter the account alias on the log in screen.

To create an account alias, visit the Account Overview panel of your account.

Create a User

To create a user, head to the User Management Dashboard.

  • Users sign in to FormSmarts with their email address, account alias and password
  • Before creating a user, add their email address to your account in the Settings Tab of the Form Builder and verify it
  • Users can change their password in the Security Settings panel of their account if they know their current password
  • The account administrator can reset a user’s password in the User Management Dashboard.

Manage User Permissions

For each form, you can grant a user permissions to:

  • access individual form entries online or download a PDF (e.g. from the link in email notifications)
  • download form attachments (file uploads)
  • generate Excel reports
  • add tags and notes to a form entry
  • edit or delete a form entry

You can also give a user account-level permissions to:

  • renew your subscription or upgrade your account (billing permissions)

To set account-level permissions, please contact Support.

How to Sign In as an Invited User

We’ve updated the log in screen to allow all FormSmarts members to sign in on the same page. Account owners (aka account admins) can sign in in the usual way with their email address and password. Invited users also need to enter the account alias provided by their account admin as shown in this video.

Multiple users are available with our Business Plus package and above.

Attach a File to a Form in a Click: File Upload Made Easy

With the new file upload feature, you can now let form users attach a picture or document to a form like in this demo.

Form with File Upload Field

Adding a file upload widget to your forms is as easy as adding a simple text box: visit the Fields Tab of the form builder, and create a new field choosing the File Upload widget. That’s all there is to it. Once a file has been uploaded and the form confirmed, that file will be stored on FormSmarts and available to you.

Customizing File Upload Fields

Although a file upload field created as just described will be fully functional, you may want to restrict the type of content the form will allow users to upload, as well as set the maximum file size permitted. You can also specify how long FormSmarts should keep uploaded documents on the server. To change these options, visit the Field Details screen of the form builder.

File Upload: Form Builder with File Attachment

Allowed Content Type

By default, a file upload field will accept all supported content types: documents (PDF, Word, Excel, RTF, OpenOffice ODF, and HTML documents) and images (JPEG, PNG, and GIF). You can restrict the type of content the form will allow users to upload to either documents or images. For example, if you’re building a job application form, you will want applicants to upload their CV and should restrict uploads to Documents to prevent mistakes.

Maximum File Size

When you add a file upload field to an online form, the maximum size of the files that can be uploaded is set to the maximum for your plan:

  • 2 Mb for Business Starter
  • 4 Mb for Business Plus
  • 8 Mb for Business Max
  • 10 Mb for Business Premier
  • 15 Mb for Business 3 and above

Edit the file upload field and use the slider to adjust that value to whatever makes sense for the purpose of the form.

Storage Policy for Uploaded Content

You can define the period of time during which FormSmarts retains uploaded content. At this time, we support eight storage policies:

  • 5 days
  • 10 days
  • 30 days
  • 90 days
  • 1 year (365 days)
  • 2 years (731 days)
  • 5 years (1,827 days)
  • Forever (default)

The period of time FormSmarts keeps form attachments can be set for each individual file upload field. To change it, edit each file upload field and set the retention period as required for your application.

To prevent accidental data loss, FormSmarts keeps, by default, form attachments on the cloud for the lifetime of the account (“forever” option). While this ensures a high level of data availability and durability, members may then exceed the upload storage quota for their accounts — currently:

  • 100 Mb for Business Starter
  • 500 Mb for Business Plus
  • 1.5 Gb for Business Max
  • 10 Gb for Business Premier
  • 30 Gb for Business 3
  • 100 Gb for Business 4

You can view your current usage in the Resource Usage section of your account. We’ll send you an email if you’re getting close to or exceed the storage space for your plan.

Note: Form attachments for online forms integrating with PayPal using Advanced Integration are retained for at least 20 days, even if the storage policy is set to 5 or 10 days.

Secure File Upload

File upload works with FormSmarts secure form feature so that files attached to a secure form only transit via a secure connection (TLS/SSL), both when uploaded to FormSmarts and when downloaded by the form owner. Form attachments uploaded securely are also encrypted at rest.

Any Feedback?

As always, your feedback is important to us and is our primary inspiration for developing new features and improving existing ones.

About the Form Builder Blog

The Online Form Builder Blog is published by FormSmarts, a web form service providing all you need to create a form and publish it online in minutes. FormSmarts makes it easy to build a form and embed it on your site. You can then get form submissions by email or store them on FormSmarts and download an Excel report. Learn more about the many other benefits of FormSmarts.