It would be great if a form could be partially filled out for a public user that needs to complete it and be able to email a link with an Access Code that would give that user access to the form.
This might help with something we're planning on doing as well.
Basically the point of the form is "here's what we know about your current information, make any changes and send it back".
The only worry that I have is that an access code needs to be effectively un-guessable or paired with another factor. Maybe given an email address, I'd like to be able to "assign" a form to an outside person. Or, be able to deliver them an access via email or other means and have them be able to "log in" to the form using that pair which would be valid until they submitted the form. It would also be nice to be able to have multi-step forms. For example: the customer logs in via one of the previously mentioned methods, and fills out a form. Then somebody internally reviews it and realizes that some information was entered wrong, and pushes it back to them for correction.
We're looking at building a self-service portal for personal property tax returns and we need to be able to uniquely identify people using an email address/code pair and then have them log in and be able to see the form prepopulated with last years information. With the current version of Forms, what we'll end up doing is mailing them a copy of last years data and a code. Then they'll use a blank copy of the form to enter in everything, including changes, and submit it.
I know that's a heavy set of requests, but it doesn't hurt to ask. It would greatly expand the utility of externally submitted forms.
This is similar to what our needs are Devin. Thank you for adding your thoughts. I think anyone that deals with the public would need this type of feature to really have an effective Form process.
Another scenario is our current onboarding software. Public users are able to make an account and log in to submit their information. Someone in HR can then go through that information and inform that user that additional information is required. Or if they are hired, we can request them to submit additional forms to complete the hiring process.
With Forms we are not able to overcome the licensing problem that our onboarding software provides currently. But if we could pair an email address with a code, as Devin mentioned and have some of the fields pre-populated it would solve a lot of those problems.
It sounds like this could be accomplished using a database lookup. Consider a form with two fields on top, e-mail address and authentication code, and a set of blank fields below. The end user would go to the form and enter his or her email address and authentication code, given to them ahead of time. Forms would use these two fields to do a database lookup, only returning rows that match both the address and the authentication code. The lookup results would be used to populate the fields below. As long as the filled fields aren't read-only, the end user could edit the populated information and (re)submit.
These codes can be generated a number of different ways; a clever workflow could not only store user information in the database and create a code, but email it out to the end user for future use.
That's similar to what we'd planned on doing, but the point of this exercise is to get you to do the work. 