The FormAssembly Data Collection Platform helps organizations collect, connect, and protect data. It features a no-code form builder that simplifies the process of collecting data in the most complex environments. Multi-stage workflows automate manual processes and business-critical integrations – including Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft – provide a connected data ecosystem that ensures data is where it’s needed, when it’s needed. Its operational standards, combined with…
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Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Microsoft Power Automate is an advanced automation platform offering a range of features, including AI-powered automation, robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), digital process automation (DPA), and process/task mining. The platform aims to empower organizations to securely automate their operations at scale by leveraging low-code and AI technologies.
Digitizing your company's physical paper transactions. Once digitized, your staff/users can easily access it with their mobiles or anything that has a browser. This gives them convenience and saves paper waste. Some scenarios I think are when some people would like to treat from assembly as a document signing platform like DocuSign or Conva.
If you are in a team that needs to develop automated solutions but have no coding experience and no access to a developer, Power Automate is one of the best places to start. It is incredibly flexible and likely has triggers and actions that can connect with your platforms, especially if you use the Microsoft stack. Additionally, using webhooks, you can connect to many different endpoints to get systems working together.
It integrates well with Salesforce. It allows for bi-directional communication which is critical for our form. To provide the custom with a good UX, the form dynamically responds to their input, saves their choices as records in Salesforce and then puts in them in the next step in the process.
FormAssembly allows for custom scripts to be used (javascript, CSS and html). This has allow for our forms to align better with our branding and provide for a more robust and clean UX.
We can communicate from one form to another using dynamic url variables. Due to the complexity of our forms this is huge. It allows for our customers to input less, save their info in Salesforce and they stay in a natural workflow regardless of how many forms we need to incorporate.
The information coming from Salesforce to use in the choices for an answer does not always appear as needed. (API vs name).
Ability for Admins to see and edit every user's forms. This would be useful in the event that someone is no longer with the institution.
When a form is cloned, it would be nice if the connector were also cloned but not active. This would allow us to verify and turn on without having to rebuild everything.
I REALLY wish I could just drop in a block of python or PowerShell code sometimes. The visual low-code things are great for moving around data but sometimes it would be faster if I could just tap out some code.
The DOM (Document Object Model) is not entirely apparent and takes a lot of trial and error, and sometimes it's even different between different connectors. I would love to be able to just see the path to access some specific variables from earlier processes.
FormAssembly continues to meet our needs, and the product functionality continues to grow, providing us with new opportunities to utilize the software. We've built many forms and associated processes on FormAssembly. It would require a large effort to migrate to another platform. We have invested a lot of time in learning FormAssembly.
The tool is very useful when used with its various native connectors, taking great advantage of the integration between the components and systems of the Office365 universe. However, its cost is still high, and automation using more advanced components containing AI resources becomes unfeasible for some companies. Due to the financial crisis that many companies are currently experiencing, investment in automation systems or tools is taking a back seat.
Given how many sophisticated features appear in the form builder itself, the back-end management can feel strikingly skimpy at times. More dynamic or visually appealing confirmation messages/email notifications would realign these with the existing capabilities of the forms themselves. This is a small issue though because data capture is our primary priority in form fills and it is always excellent in Salesforce!
Power Automate features a clean and intuitive user interface that allows users to create, manage, and monitor workflows easily. The UI is designed to be accessible to both technical and non-technical users, with drag-and-drop functionality for building workflows. Power Automate supports integration with a wide range of Microsoft and third-party applications. This flexibility in integration allows users to automate workflows across various systems, enhancing overall productivity and efficiency.
While it's not a true development package and misses some features like ingestion of external data for lists, etc... the product is fast, stable, easy to use, and will suit the needs of anyone needing online form functionality with SalesForce and other connectors available for your marketing needs.
both Community support and Microsoft official support typically respond to (and resolve) reported issues in a VERY expedient manner, usually going above and beyond for education and bugfixing. I have been thoroughly impressed with the level of support I had been provided in the past.
after reviewing the main features of Power Automate, the Microsoft trainer focused on some of our real life use cases implementation, from simple to more advanced.
although it was productive, it is more difficult to stay focused and in a 7 hours a day online training (including screen share issues and the fact that the trainer just can't precisely show the exact location of your mistake)
I was part of the migration of classic SharePoint workflows and Nintex workflows. We didn't spend much time learning the new platform because of its user-friendly interface and intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. We have mostly O365 E1 and E3 licensed users, so they can participate in our Citizen Development program and utilize Power Automate to build day-to-day business processes.
When we were researching options 2 years ago, FormAssembly beat other form tools hands down based on Salesforce integration features. The ability to declaratively set up prefill and post-submission data connectors supporting complex hierarchical data relationships was huge there. We also valued the ability to authenticate Salesforce users on the form. This allowed us to ensure that only authorized individuals could make updates to their records (and not other people's records) via the form. Since we embed it so heavily into Salesforce, we often compare FormAssembly to Salesforce's native Visualforce and Lightning Component frameworks when deciding how to fulfill a data capture requirement. Unless something very custom is called for, we very often choose FormAssembly first for the flexibility it gives us to build and iterate in the early phases of a new program.
I have many years of experience with Nintex applications and it stands up very well against Microsoft Power Automate. I hope Microsoft Power Automate can become the better workflow application. With the Integrated AI builder and continuous updates I expect they can become the better one in a few years.
Microsoft's professional services provide hands-on support throughout the implementation lifecycle of Power Automate.This includes initial setup, configuration, integration with existing systems, testing, and deployment. They ensure that workflows are correctly designed, optimized for performance, and aligned with security best practices.
We used to use Joomla built-in forms on our site... oh wow, what an upgrade. FormAssembly is miles ahead. We've saved so much time - we get better, cleaner responses and our users don't have to waste time.
Updating our existing client records using FormAssembly is a godsend. It's super easy to direct our clients to the proper places.
We get creative, sometimes. We've built in a feature for our Excel reports that automatically pushes a response through FormAssembly, into SalesForce - so that when salespeople complete an Excel report, then can quickly/easily update SalesForce without logging into anything. Thanks for the workaround, FormAssembly!
