Electronic Forms and Alternative SharePoint App Approaches

Building fully interactive electronic forms and apps can be a complex undertaking. Who is building the forms – power users, citizen developers, or full-stack developers?  Are they targeted to internal, external, or anonymous users?  What are the forms integrating with, and what are the privacy and security requirements?  Answering these questions narrows the list of options.

The session will start with the above questions.  From there we'll move to architectural thoughts on where to put your forms business logic and how to build your solutions securely.  Lastly we'll go through quite a few scenarios, both from the user perspective and lightly under the hood, using real-life examples.  Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps will factor in all of these scenarios, providing the back end business processes behind the forms.

The options we'll look at are:

  • Microsoft Forms and Forms Pro
  • Adaptive cards with input forms
  • Power Apps forms and apps
  • An SPFx and React form that dynamically generates its fields based on a SharePoint content type
  • An interactive, responsive HTML form built with Bootstrap and standard HTML 5 that posts to a Logic Apps workflow

Resources referenced in this session include the following: