Millions of people around the world leverage Microsoft SharePoint for designing and managing business solutions, tailored to their unique requirements. With thousands of customers around the world and close to 15 years of constant improvements, Ultimate Forms is a trusted platform, helping save valuable time and money. Solutions built in Ultimate Forms take a fraction of time to develop, do not require extensive knowledge or programming experience, yet are advanced and highly customizable.
In this article, I would like to focus on the features and capabilities, unique to Ultimate Forms, that have the greatest impact on productivity. This is by no means a complete overview of the product, but more of a focused spotlight targeting specific points.
In general, Ultimate Forms is divided into interactive user interface components, such as forms, calendars or charts, and backend "business logic" components, such as Actions, Alerts or Import. We will start with the Forms.
Forms
When we first started to develop Form Designer, the idea was to create forms that are powerful and feature-rich. They thrive to be sufficient for many common business applications, without the need for developing complex processes in the backend.
Although it might appear at the first glance as yet another drag & drop visual designer, it's actually chock-full of advanced features for you to discover!
Nested elements
Unlike most common form designers that pretty much stack columns on top of each other, Ultimate Forms allows you to nest tabs, containers, banners and columns. It not only allows you to create complex layouts in your forms, it also allows you to inherit permission rules. By applying a permission rule to a container for instance, it is then automatically applied to all columns within that container, without the need to create the same set of permission rules for each individual column. In large and complex forms, it speeds up the development process and makes maintenance easy!
Actions and rules
Powerful, dynamic forms are fast, interactive, reliable, and also relieve the processing load from the servers. Ultimate Forms provides a variety of dynamic features baked into the forms themselves:
- Dynamic rules - set column values based on other columns, calculations, functions, subject to conditions. In combination with read-only permissions, you can ensure column values are controlled via rules only, without user intervention, maximizing data integrity.
- Action buttons - set values to multiple columns at once with the click of a button, allowing you to create control panels on the form for triggering events.
- Backend action integration - for more complex needs, forms can trigger backend actions either with a push of a button or upon opening or closing.
- Scripting - for the very specific needs of more advanced users, the power of JavaScript is at your disposal.
Special columns
Ultimate Forms contains a selection of special column types, not present in SharePoint. Whether it's electronic signatures or relationships/repeating sections, these are some of the most valuable building blocks for common business scenarios. And because all the components of Ultimate Forms are highly integrated, you can be sure those columns are handled properly when printing, exporting or sending an alert.
Business Logic
These are various components that work behind the scenes, with or without user interaction, to perform operations or updates according to predefined rules. Ultimate Forms has several such components, such as Actions, Alerts, Import or Item ID, which cover the majority of common business needs.
Actions
Traditional workflows have been a part of SharePoint for many years. They transforms through many different reincarnations. From the humble beginnings of SharePoint Designer workflows, all the way to the current Power Automate behemoth. What is common to them all is the workflow paradigm, based on the flowchart concept. It is no doubt an extremely powerful tool. But apparently there are many users out there who are simply not technical enough. They do not feel comfortable working with these concepts.
Actions are simple, standalone pieces of functionality. Each executes a single task, has its own triggers and conditions and is generally independent of others. Actions can be added and removed from a list without affecting other actions, allowing you to make frequent changes and adjustment as you develop your solution. And with the ability to trigger on events, on timer or even manually, they are one of the most useful pieces of the Ultimate Forms puzzle!
Alerts
Customization is the main superpower of the Alerts component. You have full control over how the email looks like, who is going to receive it, where it's coming from, under what conditions it is sent and what documents come with it. Simply irreplaceable!
Import
Integration is extremely important in any business, we need to connect the data we receive from various sources and create a single unified picture. With Import, you can work with emails, SMS messages, databases, web services and APIs and even files to create or update content within your SharePoint sites automatically and transparently.
Templates
"Create once, use many times" is the way you save time! Ultimate Forms has baked-in template support, allowing you to quickly replicate whole sites with all their settings between site collections and even between different tenants. Just create yourself Template Manager credentials and save time. And with our growing catalog of business solutions (free, by the way!), you never need to start from scratch. Just grab one closest to what you need to build today and apply with a click of a button.
As you can see, our focus with Ultimate Forms has always been productivity and ease of use. And we will continue working hard to make our product even better each day!
