Forms Designer Supported in Office 365

[crashtodd]

Hey Guys,

my Company used the Forms Designer on SharePoint 2013 for years now.
Now we migrated some parts of our Intranet to SharePoint Online and are planning to migrating the rest of the Intranet.
In the last months Microsoft introduced Custom SharePoint Forms with PowerApps. I'm aware that it is our decision if we build our Forms with PowerApps or Forms Designer but can anyone make an statement if the Forms Designer will be supported on SharePoint Online in the future?
We don't want to continue to build our Forms with the Forms Designer, if we have to rebuild them in like 2 years with PowerApps or so.

Thanks!

[Nikita Kurguzov]

Hello, crashtodd!
Forms Designer is fully compatible with SharePoint Online with some minor differences from SharePoint On-Premises, you can read about them here -https://spform.com/documentation/editions-comparison

It requires a different license, one that will be tied to your SharePoint domain, but the forms are pretty much the same, you can even import existing forms from your older site using Export/Import feature in designer or Powershell.

Forms Designer Online does not support Modern UI pages, so that if you want to use it with SharePoint Online, it will automatically redirect you to classic UI.

But we are offering a new product called Plumsail Forms which was recently developed specifically for SharePoint Online Modern UI, offers responsive forms built with Vue.js and Bootstrap v4, based on Bootstrap Grid. It's a new product which is incompatible with SharePoint classic UI, but works really well with Modern pages.

This new product can also offer an extra functionality of publishing custom forms to any site which can be submitted anonymously and then handled with MS Flow to do pretty much anything, including sending emails, adding new items to SharePoint List, uploading files to Dropbox, etc.

[crashtodd]

Thanks for your quick response! That helped us really much!
I think we will go with "Forms for SharePoint Online" then.

Further I have one question now. When we're going to migrate our Forms from on-premise to SharePoint online I know the way to go is the Import/Export feature of The Forms Designer. Is this also possible between "Forms Designer" and "Forms for SharePoint Online"?

[Nikita Kurguzov]

No, exporting and importing is only supported for Forms Designer, not from Forms Designer to Plumsail Forms. Plumsail Forms has its own forms which can also be exported, but cannot be imported to Forms Designer. They are not compatible between each other.

Plumsail Forms/Forms for SharePoint Online is more of a successor to the Forms Designer, but it's a different product with very different structure, even if their functionality is fairly similar. We will continue to support and maintain Forms Designer in the future as the product to use for SharePoint On-Premises and for SharePoint Online Classic pages.

I just recommend for you to research advantages and disadvantages of SharePoint Online different layouts and make a decision based on what you need most, if you haven't done that yet. In any case, our products have you covered and will help you get the most out of SharePoint Forms.