SharePoint Power Hour Episode 111: Forms product - DFFS

hello and welcome to SharePoint power hour I'm Laura Rogers and SharePoint power hour is a weekly show we do every Wednesday to live in Central where we talk about SharePoint and office 365 solutions that don't involve hard core programming or server admin just just a ton of out-of-the-box functionalities and concepts that we demo and discuss today's demo is going to be part of a series that I started a while back where you know since info paths going away now in the year 2026 and it's also a pretty antiquated technology people are looking around for other forms products to use with SharePoint and SharePoint Online with office 365 so we have a couple of wreckers here in the chat window that you may have never seen before and now Russell and Kelly and I'm going to let them introduce themselves but they've used this product called dynamic forms for sure points on a SharePoint list and they would like to demonstrate it and you know show how it works and show how they set it up it doesn't require any server server installation they just did it within a site and wait we even they had it on a site in our farm and we were quickly able to go build that same exact list and interface in my office 365 tenant to be able to do this demo and it was a pretty fast little setup just to take that whole thing and make a sort of a copy of it so I will go ahead and let everybody introduce themselves real quick we have if you've never been to power our we have a little chat window that's it's a Q&A so if you are watching us on YouTube you'll have a little yellow icon that takes you over to the Google hangout and the Q&A is actually in the Google hangout it is a little there's a little icon of some like a little waffle icon of some squares towards the top right which lets you flip between the showcase app where we share links with you and the Q&A app where you can ask us questions as we go so feel free to ask us questions as we go that's why we do it live and let's see work we'll go ahead and let my team introduce themselves first and then Kelly and Russell so Kevin then Ryan and Stephen and then Kelly then Russell and then you guys can go ahead and do your demo good morning I'm Kevin Hughes SharePoint architect here at Rackspace and based out of Kansas City my role here is to work with our customers to figure out what their needs are within SharePoint and figure out how to make that happen then work with the rest of our team to implement it my name is Steven Wilson I am a SharePoint engineer here at Rackspace I do a lot of our configurations and migrations and things like that so I don't touch the user space as much as some of our consultants but I help out people when they first get SharePoint and they're kind of wondering what their next steps are how to create a list how to create a library how to upload things you know what they shouldn't shouldn't do and some of the basic terminology like what's a site what's a site collection all that kind of stuff I think Ryan disappeared oh well we'll see I'll let you go Kelly and Russell he disappeared because he couldn't hear anything I'm Kelly Meghan the Rackspace for about twelve years now I worked in product operations for our experts Rackspace private cloud this is been using for the past week an app or so I'm Russell Clark I'm a product manager in Rackspace private cloud and Killian are both SharePoint users and we have been working with SharePoint for a little while now building tools for some of our teams here to help improve some of the operational they have to do you guys aren't necessarily SharePoint as part of as your title or anything but you do a ton of SharePoint just in your regular job just in the business right that's correct yeah tiny popped in late so Tonya let your sheet reduce yourself real quick and then Russell I'll let you guys take over hi I'm Tonya Kaiser and I run our internal SharePoint environments at Rackspace so I get to deal with common issues that we all talk about in power our all right Russell yep you can unmute yourself okay um let me start sharing my screen I think we're showing the right thing and so this is the website for the tool that we're going to talk about today dynamic forms for SharePoint I think loris you said you were going to post that link in the little um in a little showcase app and also you might want to bump up the zoom level on your your I II just want to I'll do that now yeah just cuz the way it renders out and later in the recording it's easier for people to see maybe 125 150 yeah there you go okay yeah so this is the his websites rendering strange with that zoom let me go back out a little bit okay that's better and so this is his website this way you can download and indeed purchase the product the download is pretty straightforward his user manual is very easy to follow Alexander is the owner of this website and he is pretty active on this website we found that he is very active when it comes to responding to questions on on his pages and and pretty straightforward to use so I'm gonna take you right on into the installation of this it's fairly straightforward what I have the only thing I've set up so far is a document library called s pjs I'll say that the naming of these libraries and folders is set to be expecting these names I'm pretty sure it with a tool you can modify them but for ease of use it's just simple if you keep it named the way he recommends in his installation manual so getting this content in it's fairly straightforward I actually downloaded the tool from his website already and this folder called DF FS it's a whole bunch of files in here the recommendation from him is to actually take that entire folder and place that directly into this library so I have opened the library in my Windows Explorer so that I can just do that copy and paste real quick another option what I did with mine is just another way to do the exact same thing is you can to hit the sync button in office in your SharePoint or office 365 library and then when you sync that whole library down to your hard drive then you can take those files you extracted from the zip and just move them over that way and then they'll just sync up to SharePoint so it's just another way to do the exact same thing now for some reason I'm getting a security era let me add this site of course I'm in a live demo but it's good to know though because that's those are things that people are going to come across when you're trying to do that Wow it's telling me it's already in there hey do you want me to just drop him in there from my end while you're doing that and you can just talk about other stuff like yeah sure okay I'll just do that real quick that's definitely not working for me yeah I'm sure we all know these are the joys of live demos you can plan as much as you want but there's always gonna be something indeed do you have the files Lamar yes I do and putting them in there right now so you can just keep talking about like what your business you know yeah so the reason we started looking at tools like this is as Laura was mentioning experience of using InfoPath what we have is the pretty large forms that we're trying to work with and the default views that SharePoint creates for large lists and filling those in is not very good so we had done quite a bit of work with InfoPath and again InfoPath can be a little bit of a quirky tool so we were just on the lookout for something else that we could refresh and see them in there and the folders are still going it looks like so the folder here so we'll just take a few more seconds but you guys are not necessarily technical you're not necessarily programmers but you needed to be able to have some custom forms and start gradually moving away from InfoPath and have things that are going to be more compatible with modern browsers etc etc so this tool is the perfect solution right yeah and as the moment we get into this tool I think you'll see exactly how easy it is to use it's very straightforward okay so before we go on Laura I'm gonna ask you to make one more change okay um this what you've done here is actually the first thing we did as well which was drag the contents of the DFS FS folder yeah this all of this actually needs to be in okay I was just about to ask you that because I thought I might have done wrong yeah again I'm pretty sure you can modify where it's stored it's we've just found it simpler to to store it in the default location okay yeah it's it's syncing now okay interesting so did so when you did it wrong where was that obvious is the whole thing broken or you know it we couldn't get access to the tool it was it wasn't loading as expected so what happens is it doesn't allow you to actually link to the back end tool it actually shows the column on the list as opposed to showing the link to okay so that's a great tip alright so the DFS DFS folder is in there and it looks like yeah it looks like it finished oh it's got I'm seeing all little green check boxes in my onedrive for business ok it looks like all the other ok so then the thing that we're gonna do is create a web part page and that's because this can be placed anywhere for ease of use I'm gonna put in this folder am I seeing this right d FF s ok d f FS has just got a copy of everything now ok that's fine yeah ok so let me create now I in the documents library there that you see on the left I actually added the web part page content type so that you can actually go to documents and web part page will be one of the options there since it wasn't there in that other library ok so let me create new another little random tip by Laura indeed and I'm going to need the URL to the setup page so in the DF FS folder the setup page that's what I'm gonna copy and if I go back to my documents and I'm gonna add a webpart to this page and it is the content editor web part and then paste that file name as the URL for the content editor and we are almost finished here now there's two ways at which you can use this tool the first is you can actually add the DF FS loaded to an individual list which you would select this item and type in the name of your list if you plan on using it multiple times the easier way to do is just to add it as a site column and so I'll click that button and this is where the that folder location counts so that's why I'm pretty sure you'll be able to change this but it says it's in a document library named SP jeaious and the folder is DF FS so that's the default location and we've just kept that the tool allows you a 14 day fully functional trial at which point if you want to get a license you will need to purge the license and then email this code over and you'll get a return code that you'll fill in in this box you just repeat this again and fill in the license code and it activates the license and so that's it Save Changes so now what that's done is its created a side column that's available for me to add to a list here's a list that I prepared earlier and and let me add a side column well so why don't we show what the list looked like before Susan kind of get a picture of how it how it basically I'll do that and I forgot what is the business thing that you guys are trying to do with your list so this business for us is tracking our customer deployments and following through on what stage they are at we deploy private clouds for Rackspace customers and we take those deployments through quite a large number of steps and stages and we have a team of people that are responsible for doing that and this tool really just helps them keep everybody informed as to what is the current status of those deployments but let's go ahead and take a look at what the list would look like without us doing any of this work so this is a pretty long list with a whole bunch of information that we're capturing about the environment that we are building for the customer and so trying to fill all this information out some of its not always required it depends on what type of the deployment I might want to show and hide certain things and so we found that trying to use a list like this was a pretty poor experience for our user base and so let me go ahead now and add the site column it we actually started down the path of adding a bunch of JavaScript to hide columns and stuff like that just found that with 100 plus column lists it just got pretty hard to manage so great idea yeah this is a very common requirement that people have is just to have a form you fill out that you only ask certain things based on certain other values and based on a status or certain people see certain things etc exactly and so you'll see that these a sack column category has been added called s pjs blog and there's the DF FS loader I'll just add that to the view one of the things that I'm gonna do right away is actually as the this front in JavaScript loads on your list it there is a icon that shows the progress of the loading and you can customize this figured we would do that we have a little spinny Rackspace logo we're going to replace and it's a fairly simple line of code we haven't tested this out but you should be able to edit it edit the description of the actual site column or you can do it at the list so if you want a different logo for the list for a specific list than you do for the entire site collection you can change the logo for each individual list so basically here it is I just specify my image location and that location is pretty long because of the location code yourself or is that something you got somewhere we got off his website okay and so it's just pointing to the location of the image and the background color so I'm gonna go ahead and save that and you'll see that now this is it's now ready for us to actually begin customizing the way the forms work and the way this tool works is it customizes you can customize all three of the forms so that's the new item form the Edit item form and the display item form it will allow you to do each one differently or you can do them all the same so the first thing I do is actually just go to that form the new list form scroll right to the bottom and this is where we see the link to get into the his tool so the Heron is enter DF FS setup now if there's a problem with the installation here you would see this as normal column so it'd be a normal input field as opposed to being a link at the bottom of the field somebody named Craig says I'm a huge fan of s page s pj s and d FF s alexander is awesome and then an has a question probably you guys are gonna get to this can you change the size of the page so um we'll see when you demo the form itself yeah you can customize this thing like crazy so instead of starting from the very beginning I'm gonna I already have we already built this form out so one of the things that is very simple as copying your settings from one form to another obviously in this case the form was identical so that's that doesn't bring any of those complications but I'm just going to go to his miscellaneous tab go to the import settings and I just have a bunch of code to paste in here I got this code from from the list that I had previously customized but we will take you through all of the details of what you you can do in each of the different components of this tool you can see my spinning backspace logo so this just takes a couple of seconds to apply all of that and there it's done so that I have applied this now to the new item form I'm gonna go ahead and save that just so we can quickly see what it looks like and compared to others what the new item form looked like before and I think you will see a significant change so you can see immediately that's very cool yeah and some of these tabs are dynamic so they will change depending on what you select so if I change this to an item here you'll notice that changes to customer data center change it to something else that will change to Rackspace data center and it's collecting different data in each of those tabs so we'll take you through all of that now but what I wanted to show you was if I go back to just a list view and I have an item in here already called test if I am edit this item and I'll do it from here because I haven't customized the edit form this looks exactly the same as the new item form did before we began and but our good friend clearly uses this tool as well as creates it because he's it immediately asked me do I want to start from an existing version of that customized form when when I tried to get into the tool I said yes in fact let me just show that I kind of skipped through that pretty quickly it's really smart to make that really user friendly like that indeed so this time if I enter the setup I'm on the Edit item form I entered the setup and he asks there was no configuration found for the Edit form do you want to start from one of the configurations already created and I'm just gonna say okay and then he will give the gives me the list of all the ones that I've already created for this SharePoint list which is the new form I had already created so I'll click on that and that's as long as it takes to clone it so it's done my edit form is now the same as my new item form and obviously I can do the same thing for the display form which I'll do in a sec I want to show you the difference between the display form by default so as soon as this loads up and I can save it so now it'll take me back to the Edit item form and you can see it is now and exactly the same configuration as my new item form and I have all of those options so let me go back again let's look at the last one is the display item form I click on the item to display it and you can see it's right back to the original so again I'll enter the dynamic form setup and again I'm prompted then I don't have this configured what I like to copy an existing one I'll repeat the process it doesn't really matter which one of these they're both the same and again just a few seconds later I have now effectively applied that same look and feel will layout of tabs and rules and all those things that we've done to each of the three forms for that list so now go back to the view form or the display form rather and the key difference as you could should have noticed immediately is that this is all read-only I didn't I didn't have to do anything to make that read only because it's the display form it set everything to to read-only and it works as a display form should so I didn't have to change make any change to my customization to make it a display form versus a new or any edit form and I think I'm going to hand over to Kelly now and Kelly will actually take us through some of the features of the tool itself including tabs and rules and custom JavaScript and so on I'm gonna try to you guys should be seeing that screen now yes how's it rendering okay yeah I think so you have it to like 125 roughly okay so see as Russell pointed out it's pretty simple to install but there's a lot of things that we wanted to do that weren't necessarily right out-of-the-box features for SharePoint like hiding specific fields based on other field selections tabs as well stuff like that that you know isn't really readily out of the box available SharePoint so in order to do some of the stuff if you go into the go back into the backend tool okay you'll see all these different tabs at the top there's tabs rules accordion feel tip all that stuff so when it first comes open you'll see none of this configured and you hit configure and then it creates a new tab we just look at any one of these you can this is the customer details tab so on this one we want to show specific fields so you can you create the you create the tab and then you can select which fields you want to be visible on this tab so for this one we chose customer name account number Salesforce number billed nickname then we can add HTML sections or headings stuff like that if we want to just design the layout a little better than just having to put forms on the screen so on the tab so let me give you an instance where we create a rule to show show a specific tab so if you look down here under configuration details we ask the customer what data center that one they want to deploy their RPC environment in so we created a rule called CDC data center so this rule is simply looking for the value of the data center field and if it's equal to CDC which stands for customer data center then we wanted to show the customer data center tab and hide the Rackspace data center tab so it's just a simple rule that just basically takes the value and changes it based there takes the value of the data center and changes the tab arrangement based on that selection really simple straightforward you don't have to know I need Java Script to be able to do it all you have to do is create this rule that says if this if it looks like this then show me this blue and hide this field let me show you is there a concept of rule types like an info path you have like a validation rule and a formatting rule in action like what can you do with rules just in general well you can so you can create different there's different triggers for the rule so you can set it based on the change of one of these fields or all this other stuff so you can trigger onload I wanted to compare it to people click the field all that all that sort of stuff you can do strictly out of the box with this that's nice my question that's awesome and then you can also you know there's other things that we haven't really delve into but any of these help all these question marks if you hover over them they give you more details about what what that specific function is capable of so you know one thing we were looking at was it didn't necessarily say you couldn't really do if this or if-else statements in here but if you looking a little closer you can do compare multiple rules so we wanted to have rule one and two basically if you wanted to have rule a rule implement based on multiple rules you can you can do that with this and these rules function equal to false and by hovering over this these question marks you can see that will be here so example is its rule one hand rule two are true and rule three or rule 4 are through then implement that rule all right Kevin in the chat window has a question can rules be applied based on a user's missions like group membership absolutely can we haven't actually run this but know there is a section in here I don't mean to put you on the spot we can just you can continue what you were showing us and then we can maybe I'll look for that no I know what the tabs you can definitely make specific tabs appear based on users that's that's better than InfoPath and go past can't really do that it's all it's very complicated and stupid to be able to do that okay yeah I'm not a huge fan of abet so let's show you that rule I think Russell already demo they don't I minute earlier but here's like configurations detail and notice this Rackspace data center tab over here that's the default value so if we switch this to CDC it changes that customer data center tab so now we have the customer data centers out now if we switch that to DFW then we have a different set of it instead of input fields and the other thing is cool we've heard another rule where we don't want to just hide the field we want to hide the field and delete the values so that we don't have things stored in the fields that shouldn't be stored so what we do is create another rule so we're then go back and we switch this back to CDC you'll see obviously the tab Janine but then you go back in to Rackspace data center all the informations disappeared because we deleted it based on death selection so that's another type of rule that we can we can show you how in a minute but all this stuff is guy dressed as I say Kenny didn't you're also working on a notification for that condition so what we wanted to do is actually let our user know that if they proceed they're going to lose data in so we are busy working on Kelly's working on writing a condition that will notify the user and say are you sure you want to proceed because you're going to lose all of this information if you continue I was exactly and you can do that use this custom j/s so you can do whatever custom jQuery you belong in here and it will fly so with this one this one's actually not working but what it what it's looking for is what's her name field and then if the customer name field has changed then set tenant 1 equal to customer name so actually I think I just fix it so it should be working now but really it's simple really simple and straightforward to be able to add SharePoint jQuery functions into the ability of the DFS forms so I have it working on our other form but not here you can do you can do whatever jsut want another thing that's pretty cool is switching the way these fields look you can do specific field JavaScript you plugged in earlier I think we can change you can do specific CSS within a specific field name like we wanted to reduce the size of the input field we could easily do that with JavaScript this is it so is this sort of like conditional formatting or is this just always show this feel a certain way yeah this will be always show this build a specific way now there's actually three I think three or there's at least three different ways to natholi CSS here there's the field you can do it specifically on a given field you can do custom CSS which will apply across the entire this entire form or you can actually change the front end values and within the within all the files that we uploaded earlier you can actually switch the CSS there so if you want to make it universal throughout your entire site collection it can pull the front end like we added these different header types if you'll notice these are basically on the tabs we have these different values here so we declared that age 22 value which is basically the blue header value which is displayed on the form here okay so kind of one of the general ideas it looks like behind this is that you don't have like a user interface where you're visually working with the fields or dragging them or clicking on them to do things with them it's all sort of done more behind the scenes with just an overall list of rules and overall list of fields so I mean it's a very practically free product but that just seems like you know kind of one of the major differences between this one and a lot of the higher-end form editors right well you're not you're not visually editing your form like you don't see the form on the page and you're not like dragged right around and you know editing colors directly on them that kind of thing like SharePoint designer used to do yeah yeah those are those are tools that a lot of people are familiar with so this is just a little bit something different to get you know the feel for but you can do it looks like all not only all the same things the other ones did but but more stuff you know capabilities yeah I think other things we like about it is it's not messing with the list itself it it's eyeing this there's a you know scripting after the fact it's just Pat renders the list so that's quite helpful another cool rule that we put in place is we have we have a number of different like availability zones that the customer can enter in now what I hate on a forum is showing 10 different fields when you only populate one or two of them right so with this as soon as you populate one automatically into the next one they don't have to show that entire list of 20 different fields just to get you know two answers from the customer so and then when you delete these that automatically takes the ones below okay so that's sort of like almost like the concept of repeating tables maybe like a sort of a table inside your list but you actually had to create separate fields from every single like possible iteration of those exactly exactly the field in this list yeah five possible but we only show one by default and as they fill in that first one the second one pops up and in case they want to fill in a second what's your Documents tab is that and where people are attaching things or yeah that seems that's basically the attachment call so it allows you to go in and attach specific documents to this form as attachments awesome I could just keep asking me questions but I don't want to interrupt your no let's see let's go back to I guess the interface where you were doing all the how do you get back to the admin sort of part of this okay so at the very bottom once once the columns installed on the list if you scroll down to the bottom you'll see this enhance wiki at the fest it's just a it's just a link that takes you right to the interface okay and you can control who can see them so that is controllable under the miscellaneous tab you can set the group people that are able to enter setup and here you can actually add new fields to the list as well nice another another thing this deferred loading of DF FS so you may run into an issue where you have so many people figures on on a on a form that it takes too long to load and DF FS tries to load before those people Pickers are completely populated so you can actually set a delay to to allow the forum to load before DFS the DF FS overlay actually turns on cool um so let's I guess just lets family go through each of the buttons at the top just to kind of get an overview of what you can do on there so I know we went to a couple of them but I'm just kind of curious so calves yes it's actually just two how many tabs you want at the top on the form itself and you can actually adjust so if you notice here there's so many tabs that it goes on to the next row so you can set that actually in miscellaneous too if you want you can split the tabs into multiple rows so if we wanted three tabs in each row then when we save it you'll notice that all the tap it'll only have three rows of tab there I only have three columns of tabs so did you see that so you know just real simple to change the look and feel of your form you make a field not necessarily according to a condition but just make things read-only according to a condition or even according to who's looking at it now you can with the so if you look here you have the optional fields you have visible fields required fields and hidden fields so you can do all that stuff now I know I've seen it oh I see it on the right read-only fields yeah read-only read-only fields is here so if we wanted to make one of these specific fields we only we could yeah we can add whatever field you want just pulls from the list of fields so so is that per tab or is that just this this is it depends on it it's only when the rules implemented right so this is the rule so if glancing back in storage is equal to NetApp then we want these visible fields these required fields and we could set read-only fields so it's based on the rule being triggered and one thing that's kind of cool is like when you said it when you create a tab you don't really have you say what fields you want visible but you don't have to say which ones you don't want it'll automatically assume that if you want these fields visible you don't want these other fields to be hidden and if you wanted to say you wanted to have like a review tab where you had where you have all your fields all you have to do is hit create a new field and don't put anything in it just give them name and when you hit save you'll have you'll have a tab that shows every single field on your form so here's the tab I just created called gone and it shows every single field well every single field - the rules that are in place these rules would still apply I guess so I guess so what were some of those other buttons besides rule so in the tabs rules what does accordion are you guys using that we're not using it but I think I set up an example of how it's being used we're not using our look form but for this let me see if it's actually set up it might not because okay I don't mean to put you on the spot that's right it's it's really it's really simple to actually to implement so we can show you so if we for instance what it would do is if we wanted to stand there it basically accordion allows you to expand or or contract the number of list items so if we wanted we want to just click standard VLANs and then show the fields that are in standard VLANs it would expand those fields and hide the ones that we want to be hidden so anything so basically think of it like like an expanding tree right for files russell's or anything you wanted to add yeah if back into the task let's show on a couple of things here so I think what might be good is just a joke you know with a couple of clicks you see if you take a look at if you go right to the bottom there then we've got tab 1 let's just delete that tab and just point out the action section do what so point out where you add remove and move tab okay so down here at the bottom of each tab you have the clone new delete you can move it up and down so that'll position it on your form if you want it left or right or move it to an index so like if we wanted tab 1 to be the first tab we would set it to index 0 which moved it all the way up to the top so now instead of being on the on the right side of the form it'll be on the left side it looked like that there was another tab in there called field to evil well I guess that would be like a repeating table kind of thing up at the top next to custom CSS field table oh this is just your list of with your display name and the internal name and the type of field that it is yeah that's candy reference page actually if you're trying to remember what the internal name is and for for veteran uses of Rackspace's of sharepoint you know that when you first create a list item or a column whatever name you get it is the name it hats forever even if you change that name yep so that this list shows you the field in town name if you need to recall what it was that's nice I like that cascading dropdowns people love cascading dropdowns are you know using any of those we're not we don't actually even have it configured but when you click on any of these tabs it gives you a link to find out more information about that tab so and actually during the process of installation you actually have the ability select which ones you want of these plugins to be installed Russell just did the default of just the DF FS but you can install these as well when you go through that setup process there's it's actually checkboxes I don't know if you guys noticed I'm that there's checkboxes if in fact you can modify that stuff at any time so if you go back to that web part page where I initially did the kind of setup from if you just follow the same steps as I did the very first time you can add the options at that point nice so we we can show side-by-side so from a tab you can select columns to you know input columns to show up next to each other in yes so if you remember we had a customer name account number or Salesforce number and build nickname they're all stacked on top of each other right so if we wanted to put customer name next to account number and then underneath that have salesforce number next to building name build nickname we could just create apply to the side by side column by putting in index and and if i think the easiest way to think about index is just row what row you want it on so now we would have customer name and account number in Row 1 and sales number and building so source number and build nickname in Row 2 and then we can change the position of where we want the label so let's put the label on the Left instead of hiding it so then when we save that should see customer names side by side account so it applies that last horizontally as opposed to vertically and in this case if you did this you probably also apply the custom style sheet against those fields to shorten the width of that input box and which was the one we showed earlier yeah so that's the field CSS where you can change the the size of those input fields there's some other side by side settings you can do didn't play with these too much the one thing that we did do was replace the the labels so instead of having the labels that come from the ship one lists or the shipment column you can replace the labels and give it a completely different heading in this case you adding I think leave it like because you're just gonna add a description for that row as well leave it sure that the titles the existing one position yeah no no fibers run see now it added these so we can actually if we didn't want to have this customer name if you don't have the description of that field you can simply go back to the tab whoops simply go back into the tab say that know you're in there this is one thing you have to keep an eye on his watch for me so this is the display form if you click on the link at the bottom of the display form the display form layout that you're modifying the forms then you have to remember to go like copy your settings to all if you want them all to be the same yeah and delete the existing form on the other tab and then when you go to edit again it it'll say hey you don't have a form here do you want a copy one that you already do have and then you pick nice what was that vlookup thing that I saw we we have an installed lookup to another list nice already a lookup field in SharePoint is that like separate from that we haven't played with it separate I think it's separate allows you to look up a list item in another field based off of a column do you obviously have in common between them and you can start showing the contents from another list in this form it's very cool so now these are hidden now the columns are hidden so so we wanted to take what we've done with the edit form and put it on the new form all we have to do is simply go into the new form the back in for the new form obviously you can see here this stuff is still as it was when we first implemented it we'll just go up here and hit delete and that deletes the current config or a new form that it is now it opens up the form again it's back to how it was now we want to apply the changes that we made on the Edit form clones it save it and now the new form looks just like the other nice in my in my experience I usually have I usually do have a completely different new form then in the Edit form because you know when somebody's first filling out whatever this type of request is usually there's a ton of stuff they don't need to see um that's exactly how we use it we have a new almost normally initiated by someone who just kicks off the process and so there's only a very small number of things that we need to start the process so that's all we show them on the new form there is the Edit form is for the guys are actually managing the process and so they need see a whole lot more stuff right but with this tool it's so easy that if you have the Edit form completed how you want it you can clone the Edit form to the new form and then just delete the stuff that you don't need so the configuration will look exactly the same it's just you don't need all those specific fields you only want to ask these ten fields instead of these hundred fields yeah you can just go and delete the tabs even right it's that simple nice I had several more questions that I want to see like the rest of the team here if y'all have anything that you any questions in mind you guys we have 34 live viewers by the way it's a lot I guess just a couple of things that you can do you can in terms of a list of features that we've we make use of so one is hide tabs show tabs depending on rules the HTML section which we looked at where we when we're adding the sections and titles for those sections so what the page would you looking at right now with customer details we used that's an an HTML section on the tab and in terms of the rules that you capable of let's go back to that rules link actually because I think there's an awful lot built in that very easy to use so if we just scroll down and kind of hang around there so with any rule deciding what's going to be an optional field a visible field an editable field required field hidden fields and read-only fields is super straightforward you just literally click Add field on any one of those and when that rule triggers it will apply to you know according to what you've which feels you've actually spected under those conditions so it's it's really easy to use it just requires the understanding of logic analogical brain to be able to think through some of this stuff right it does and it necessarily in views or Betty in accounting could do this but a lot of you know are our typical audience could yeah power user as opposed to an end user tool and typically what we've found is that our end users anywhere is the target for the output not necessary for this so like the teams I have managing our customer deployments they don't want to know anything about SharePoint you know they don't want to do you know it's how they track their work they don't want to be getting into this stuff anyway whereas or less I'm trying to make my cool and so this is this is a pretty pretty neat for us it's an interesting sort of balance I'm seeing with all these form editing tools as far as whether they're more user-friendly like a wider audience of people could do it person is it's got a lot more functionality and a lot more frequent it's a little more complicated to understand logic and things like that so I'm sorry team did you all have questions no shake your heads I've got a couple more no real questions but I'd say you know one that this is something that may be you know the end user who has a talent for this kind of thing could figure out a lot more easily than they could InfoPath and oh pretty cool product Jeremy asked about the resource management functionality we haven't really go into that yet so not sure there but again it's a it's a 14-day free trial and really first for just one site it's 50 bucks licenses.only $50 so it's very reasonable that's nice for it a whole sack collection actually so it's $50 okay I think that make it we have a couple of questions in the queue a area about you know large companies using it or you know can you use it to are can you display the resource management functionality you know given the 14-day trial and the cost of it per site collection this would be something that you know even though we haven't seen it in widespread usage I think a lot of companies could take a flyer on the 50 bucks to to see how well it worked for them yeah which is exactly what we did we just said it's $50 we're gonna spend the money and and use it and see questions in this in the Q&A Steven asking that do maybe you see things that I don't see this yes I see one from Jeremy Lomond and one from Josh Swearingen swearing it so it just says do you know of any large companies we have about 5,000 users in our company is concerned about useless utilizing solutions such as this but they aren't ready to buy k2 or an index either if we take a look he's got a pretty good explanation about his licensing on his website the corporate user site collection license is probably the exact one that a person is looking for and that's $50 or that connection design for a large corporate and actually as a large company you are a buy more than one of those licenses from him so she had three side connections you wanted to apply this on you could buy three of those you don't have to go he's designed it like that so you don't actually have to go through your big procurement process in order to get hold of this licensing I mean he's he's obviously works with a lot of enterprises and and has experienced that but it's all explained on the license section on his website so by all means take a look at that which we shared that in the little showcase app for you guys to get the link to that it's called DF FS dynamic forms for SharePoint and then Jeremy says are you able to display the resource management functionality I'm not sure so the we haven't used that part of the tool yet and that is designed for things like room with petitions and so like booking conference rooms or things like that and he he has that all documented on his website again I think it's fairly straightforward to to get set up but we just haven't explored that particular section yet ah smells nice well I had I had some this is really really cool I had some other questions about just some of the other little buttons I saw on there but we're we're done we're we're over our hour but I feel like I'm gonna go play around with this and try it out and seems like a lot of fun um let's see back over to me thanks guys for visiting our power our this week and it was fun having having you as guests we appreciate you guys doing the demo and I guess I'm not sure what we're doing next week for power hour but thanks everybody for coming and we had like something like 35 live viewers awesome so everybody have a good week

Channel: SharePoint at Rackspace

Views: 7,488

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: HOA

Id: dCgBxz9ucyA

Length: 61min 40sec (3700 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2016