An Alternative to Out-of-the-box SharePoint Forms

Ultimate Forms changed my life as a SharePoint solutions developer. Back in the early 2010's, I was a just learning the SharePoint platform and working almost exclusively using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities and custom code. It was a painful process requiring deep technical experience and programming in order to bring custom functionality to SharePoint. The SharePoint platform was full of possibilities, but very difficult to customize. The same is true today. As part of a project, I discovered and adopted Infowise Ultimate Forms in order to fulfill a customer's requirements. It changed everything. By working through a visual interface and creating rules through the UI building SharePoint solutions became faster and easier - especially building custom SharePoint forms.

SharePoint Solutions Begin with SharePoint Forms

Today, and I find myself using Ultimate Forms to build all my SharePoint solutions. It speeds up my whole development process and lets me build complete SharePoint solutions in weeks instead of months. But what is it that makes building solutions in Ultimate Forms so much easier? Everything starts with the modern Form Designer tool. This tool is the keystone of the entire toolkit. Everything begins with the form. What specific features make form building easier? Let's take a look:

1. No Code

This is most important. Custom programming is time consuming eating up hundreds of hours. Microsoft's equivalent form building product Power Apps requires  extensive programming with nested code snippets scattered throughout the interface. It is frustrating and a long process to build dynamic forms using this platform. In Ultimate Forms, you never have to program anything. Dynamic forms functionality is configured using dropdown menus and a simple rules based setting system. You never have to used nested code or learn technical programming. You can make fully dynamic forms quickly without digging for code examples and long training videos required when trying to learn the many complex and convoluted aspects of Power Apps.

2. Container Based Form Layout

Having the ability to place elements where you want in the form is essential. This is simple to do using the Form Designer container system. Each container can be dragged onto the form in seconds. Using a simple slider, you set how many columns you want the each container to use. It is so easy to understand, you don't need to learn anything at all. Just drag and drop containers into the form. What you see is what you get!

3. Style with Speed

Controlling the look of forms is important. Forms are all around us - we use them every day. Each has its own look and feel. You should be able to make forms look the way you want easily. With other form building processes, if changing how the form looks is either extremely limited or very difficult. Ultimate Forms allow apply styles including background colors, text colors, padding, borders and font in the simplest possible way. Just pick an element on the form and "Add new style". Configure is easy - just pick from dropdown picker options or click on a color swatch.

4. Copy and Paste

It seems obvious - when you have repeating elements or rules in a form, you should be able to just copy and paste. Most form building tools don't let you do this. In Ultimate Forms you can copy repeating elements and rules by just clicking the copy button. Need three copies of a styled container in your form? Click - click - click. Done! Many forms have a series of columns or sections that match the same patter - copy and paste help you build fast.

5. Drag and Drop

Reordering elements in the form using drag and drop makes adjusts fast. Click on an element and drag it where you want it. It's common to need to reorder columns or sections. The drag and drop funtionality lets you make those adjustments with ease. Reshuffle your form elements quickly by dragging them where you want.

6. Create Columns on the Fly

Instead of creating all your columns from the SharePoint list settings screen, you can simply make the columns as you go in Form Designer. In fact this is the natural way that forms get built. After all, we can't think of every single column we need before we begin building a form. Just click the New column link to add new columns to the form any time. Even better, Ultimate Forms provides additional column types like the Signature column, Connected Lookup and User Property columns.

7. Dynamic Permissions

Creating dynamic forms with other tools is hard. It requires custom programming. Nobody has time for that! With Ultimate forms showing or hiding columns and sections is just a matter of adding permission rules to the element. Adding a rule to an element is so, so easy. As an example, if you want a column to be shown on the edit and display forms, but not when the form is first filled out, you do these simple steps: 1. Click "Add new rule" 2. Check the "Write". 3. Click the "Edit" and "Display" checkboxes then save. It couldn't be easier.

8. Dynamic Validation

Out of the box SharePoint validation is limited. You can just set whether a column is required or not. It doesn't allow for dynamic conditions. With Ultimate Forms, you can create validation rules to conditionally require column only when conditions are met. It doesn't require any special configuration. As an example, if I want to require the column "Approval Note" when "Status" is set to "Approved" I would just do this: 1. Click "Add new rule". 2. Set the condition "Column not equals blank". 3. Add the condition "Status" = "Approved" and save. Simple to understand and simple to set up with only a few steps.

9. Dynamic Values

Setting values in columns automatically is essential. As an example, a common case is when you want the name of the person making a request to auto-populate. With Ultimate Forms you can do that so easily. 1. Click "Add new rule". 2. Select "Dynamic Rule". 3. Use the reference "Current user". Select to apply in "New form" and save. We want to make life easier for users, so pre-populating data make it easy on them.

10. Reusable Templates

The more forms you build, the more often you will want to reuse a form you did previously. Form Templates allow you to save any form as a template and recreate it anywhere any time. Our Template Manager tool makes the process easy. Save out your form or even even all forms in a site and you can reuse that in other locations as needed. This is all managed from within SharePoint. No need to use any external files or tools.

11. Prebuilt Solutions

Ultimate Forms provides a huge library of 421 pre-built solutions. These are all included as part of our software with no additional costs. These can be used as turn key solutions or as a starting point to speed up your development process. Being able to pull from our solutions libary allows you to avoid building solutions from scratch saving time and speeding up your ability help users deploy new processes.

Easy Form Building is a Way of Life

Once you have access to a much more efficient tool that is saving you time and headaches, you will never go back. It changed everything for me when I began using it and I can now safely say that I will never go back. I tell new customers all the time that you wonder how you did things before you had access to these tools. Your quality of life setting up new SharePoint solutions changes that much. Some organizations think that they should use only out-of-the-box tools, but by being closed to this opportunity for improvement they miss out on so many great improvements. It may be hard to believe that this form builder is that much easier to use, but you can find out for yourself easily. New customers can sign up for unlimited access to Ultimate Forms at any time. Set up only takes a few minutes. Try it for yourself and you will soon be on your way to a new life of easy SharePoint forms building.