Migrating from InfoPath to FlowForma is a piece of cake

Conor McGrath00:01

Hi everyone, I hope you're all keeping well, and thanks for joining our webinar today about FlowForma's InfoPath Migration Tool, and why migrating from InfoPath to FlowForma is a piece of cake. My name is Conor McGrath and I'll be your host. I'm delighted to be joined by my colleague David Shanley, process consultant here at FlowForma. Welcome, Dave.

David Shanley00:22

Thank you very much for having me. Hi, everybody.

Conor McGrath00:25

I'll hand you over to Dave, who's going to talk about why you're here and about FlowForma to begin with, and I'll pop back in later for the Q&A session. Over to you, Dave.

David Shanley00:41

Thanks, Conor. The purpose of the webinar is to talk initially about InfoPath and why you need to migrate from it. As you all know, or you wouldn't be on this webinar, support for InfoPath is ceasing in 2026. Aside from that, the functionality InfoPath offers is a little outdated. It doesn't have mobile enablement, for example. These are serious considerations, and it's time to look at an alternative.

David Shanley01:20

So why choose FlowForma Process Automation as a replacement for InfoPath? FlowForma is a process automation tool that sits on SharePoint as part of your Office 365 offering, and it's 100% no-code. It's been designed from the ground up for process owners to build with, and you build in one single interface that combines forms, workflow and document generation. You can access the forms you create from your browser, from our mobile app or from Teams.

David Shanley02:00

The speed at which you can build is critical. It's all about agile building environments, and process owners being able to build quickly using an intuitive interface, with a product that's affordable. FlowForma is an award-winning process automation provider, recognized by the Forrester Wave and Microsoft awards, and more than 200,000 users use FlowForma across 20 countries.

David Shanley02:44

Here's a snapshot of some of our customers across the globe, from Maverick Construction in Boston all the way to Inland Rail in Australia, the largest freight rail infrastructure project in Australia, with 1,700 kilometers of track being built. Aon, one of the world's largest insurance brokers, had different business units running different processes, with a legacy dependency on Excel, email and paper, no audit trails and a lack of visibility. With FlowForma they automated a large number of processes in a fraction of the time, standardized them across business units, and got one source of truth, with processes ranging from HR onboarding and offboarding to insurance vetting and complaints.

David Shanley03:46

The A14 is the biggest road project in Britain, a joint venture between Costain, Skanska and Balfour Beatty. In construction, IT adoption is typically quite poor: there are a lot of manual, paper-based processes and a distributed workforce, with people on site and in head office. The challenges were around end-to-end process visibility, which they didn't have, and a single source of truth. They also needed mobile and offline capabilities, and FlowForma fitted the bill. They've built more than 70 processes over 18 months, and one of them, the targeted risk monitoring process, has already saved them £77,000.

David Shanley04:33

And on the right you'll see LSTM, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which has made its entire finance department paperless using FlowForma.

David Shanley04:53

So what are the benefits of migrating to FlowForma Process Automation? It's 100% no-code, designed from the ground up for process owners. It isn't a solution originally designed for developers and shoehorned into that role. You work in one build interface that combines your forms, workflow and document generation. It has mobile app capabilities for iOS and Android, and when you design a process you don't have to repurpose it for the mobile app; that's done for you automatically.

David Shanley05:30

And the speed at which you can build is key, so you can keep prototyping until you get the process right, and changes and refinements can be made very quickly. It takes away the traditional reliance on IT. If IT delivers a solution for you, you might get it back three or six months later, and by then there's a disconnect: it doesn't resemble the current version of the process, and user adoption can be a challenge. So it's a better user experience all around.

David Shanley06:08

So meet our InfoPath Migration Tool. This is our InfoPath conversion tool, and I have some InfoPath templates here that we're going to convert into FlowForma templates. One consideration when you migrate processes from InfoPath is how many you need to take across. Some may be redundant and you may not need them. Others may need a little refinement and change. And in some cases a process can go across as is, because it hasn't changed much over time. We'll look at some of these scenarios.

David Shanley06:59

I'm going to select an InfoPath template called EAA report, an employee annual appraisal. On the left you see the InfoPath form template, and on the right the FlowForma flow template, which is an XML file we'll import into our FlowForma environment. If I expand the InfoPath template, you'll see all its sections. I want to add section two as a step in my new FlowForma template. A step in FlowForma is a block of content you can assign to a person or a group of people.

David Shanley07:48

As content is brought across, a person or group field, or a date and time field, keeps the same data type. It won't take across the data underpinning a drop-down, nor any code used for business logic in InfoPath. So you'll need to apply your business logic, but the beauty of FlowForma is that you can do that very quickly because it's 100% no-code, unlike the business logic in an InfoPath template, which essentially has to be done by developers.

David Shanley08:30

Let's say I want to take just one question from the next section and add it to my section two step. I can bring it across very easily, delete nodes or questions I don't need, and keep adding as I go. I can take the year-end summary section across as another step, with all its questions. This saves an awful lot of heavy lifting when I build my process in FlowForma: my text fields are already in place, so I don't have to key in those questions. All I need to do is apply my business logic.

David Shanley09:23

In the objectives section there's a repeating table. I can add it as is, and it keeps the structure it had in the InfoPath template. I can keep adding and layering up my new FlowForma flow. That's an example of an InfoPath template you can repurpose and restructure as you work through it.

David Shanley09:53

Now let me reset and take another process, an annual appraisal. If I expand it, you'll see the different sections in my InfoPath template. In the first example we repurposed and restructured the framework of the template as we brought it across. Here, maybe the process isn't fundamentally changing, so I'll just add everything and take it across in its entirety. Then I save the flow to my desktop as an XML file, which is a FlowForma flow definition.

David Shanley10:58

Once that's saved, I go into one of my environments and import it. I click Import Flow, locate the flow on my desktop, and it pulls through all the steps and all the questions. Then I click Import.

David Shanley11:27

Once it's imported, I open it in Flow Designer, your three-in-one toolkit that combines forms, workflow and document generation in one interface. On the left I can expand each of the sections, which have now become steps in FlowForma. When you're bringing a lot of processes across, taking the question titles across saves a significant amount of time. All you have to do is change some of the question types. For example, Position was a drop-down in InfoPath, and it came across as a single line of text, but I can very quickly change it to a choice question and enter my choices.

David Shanley12:41

The beauty of FlowForma is that you're working in one interface and can apply business logic very quickly. We have a four-step process, and let's say we want to add a training step. On the initial step we'll ask, 'Is training required?' If the answer is yes, a second step called Training appears. So I add the step, call it Training, and position it as the second step. To that step I add two questions: 'Training completed', a simple yes/no, and 'Reason not completed', as multiple lines of text, to capture why if it wasn't. The question types align with the native SharePoint data types, and we have our own custom question types too, so there's a lot of depth to the software.

David Shanley14:03

Then I add 'Training required' to my first step as a yes/no question, and hide the Training step. The trigger point that decides whether it's required is 'Training required equals yes'. I add a hide/show step rule there. The rules are grouped by category: workflow control rules, data integration rules, communication rules, SharePoint actions and so on. It's simple logic, not low-code, and it doesn't need a developer. The process owner can build it.

David Shanley15:24

I edit my conditions, drill into the first step, set 'Training required' equals yes, and choose to show the Training step. That's my first rule in place. It's easy to see where rules sit, because it's all about context: if I select a question with no rules, there's nothing defined; if I select 'Training required', I see a summary of the rule and can edit it from there.

David Shanley16:09

On the Training step, if 'Training completed' equals no, I want to capture why. So I hide 'Reason not completed' and add another workflow control rule on 'Training completed'. These are the rules you'll use about 70% of the time, whatever your process. If training completed equals no, show 'Reason not completed'.

David Shanley17:00

Let's see how the form looks now. I create a new annual appraisal form, and this is what the end user sees. The header can be customized with a company logo, and you can pull data captured in the form up into it. In the step bar, the current step shows in white and there are three subsequent steps in sequence; steps can run in parallel too. Here's the question we changed to a choice. If training required equals yes, the Training step appears at the top. If I change my mind and say no, it's gone.

David Shanley17:54

When I click Submit, rules can fire: an email notification to the owner of training, assigning the step to a specific person or group, and so on. That takes me to the second step, and if training completed equals no, I'm asked why. That's how quickly you can build with FlowForma. You take the heavy lifting out by migrating the framework and structure of your processes from InfoPath, and then implement your workflow logic quickly, so you can repurpose your old InfoPath processes very quickly. And it can be done by the business, the people who know the process best.

David Shanley18:55

This is a customer journey for Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS, a very good example of an organization with a large number of InfoPath forms to migrate, and they found the FlowForma migration tool very useful. If you can structure your process and bring it across without keying in all your fields again, which is time-consuming for long-running processes, and then apply your business logic quickly, your processes can be turned around and repurposed very quickly.

Conor McGrath19:39

Thanks very much, Dave, for the demonstration and the case studies. We've come in a little early, so we have plenty of time for questions. The first: FlowForma forms look quite different to InfoPath. Is it easy to print them?

David Shanley20:02

FlowForma has document generation capabilities. Once you install the FlowForma Word plug-in on the desktop version of Word, you can generate a Word document populated with content from the form, and convert it to PDF if you wish. The document doesn't have to resemble the form; it can follow any template structure. You pull tokens from your process build into the document template, and they're populated with the right content when the generate document rule fires.

Conor McGrath20:53

Another question: how does email work in FlowForma? Is it as easy as InfoPath?

David Shanley21:01

It's easier. You can create emails populated with information from the form, attach documents, and apply a condition that decides when an email is sent. You can also schedule emails for a set time, now or a date in the future, such as today plus three days. So you can use email rules to make sure processes keep to their SLAs and times to completion, and escalate when you need to.

Conor McGrath21:48

Steve is asking: can you export data from FlowForma to a database like Azure SQL or SQL Server?

David Shanley22:01

Yes. We have built-in rules that let you export your data to SQL Server very quickly and easily, and once it's in your SQL database it's easy to report on.

Conor McGrath22:19

Can you send a FlowForma form by email, like InfoPath?

David Shanley22:30

All the data in FlowForma is stored centrally. We sit on SharePoint and use it as a content database, so all you need is a link to the form. With that link you can open the form in your desktop browser, or use our mobile app for iOS and Android, online or offline, or our Teams app. There are lots of ways to engage with forms.

Conor McGrath23:07

How can IT teams manage processes?

David Shanley23:13

If you want to try FlowForma, IT would initially set up a site collection, install the app, and provision an environment for you to try out the tool. Ultimately, our Governance Hub gives IT visibility of all the environments FlowForma lives in. They can provision a sandbox, a UAT and a production environment, decide who has access to what, and control which processes are promoted from one environment to the next. It's not just about how fast you can build; it's how you manage the process, with visibility and control.

Conor McGrath24:14

Is the data for a form stored in a traditional SharePoint library, and can I look at the saved data from native SharePoint?

David Shanley24:27

All Forms is the name of the list the form data is stored in, so we use SharePoint as a data repository. Because we sit on SharePoint and are tightly integrated with it, we can also pull data from native SharePoint lists and write data back to them.

Conor McGrath24:56

Someone's asking whether we have a mobile app. I know we do, so can you explain a bit more about how it works?

David Shanley25:07

We have a mobile app for iOS and Android, and you don't need a specific form design for mobile. You build for desktop and the form is rendered for mobile automatically. The app is used a lot in construction because it works offline: if you have no connectivity you can still work on a process, the data you enter is cached on your device, and it's uploaded to SharePoint once you're connected again.

Conor McGrath25:55

Are there any prerequisites for FlowForma?

David Shanley26:01

SharePoint Online. FlowForma sits on SharePoint Online as part of your Office 365 offering, so that's a must-have.

Conor McGrath26:14

Can FlowForma be integrated with systems we already have, for pushing or pulling data?

David Shanley26:21

Yes. It depends on the system. If it's in the cloud and has a connector in Azure, we can use our Logic App connector, or we can use web services where a REST API is available. There are lots of ways to do it, depending on the scenario.

Conor McGrath26:43

A question about onboarding: how does that work?

David Shanley26:50

For building your initial processes, we have a SureStart program, which means your first process or processes are built with our customer success team. That gives you hands-on experience of building with FlowForma, so you can take that knowledge and keep building yourself, with our support.

Conor McGrath27:25

Can you populate a drop-down with data from an external source?

David Shanley27:31

In short, yes. We have SQL lookup built into the tool, so you can look up SQL Server data and pull it through straight away. Dynamics CRM integration is in place too, as is HubSpot, out of the box.

Conor McGrath28:06

And a question about reporting: how does that work?

David Shanley28:17

It depends on the type of reporting you want. Process Performance is part of the core tool and shows visually how processes are performing against predefined SLAs and times to completion. For management reporting on data captured in forms, you might push the data to SQL Server and pull it into Power BI dashboards. There are lots of ways to report.

Conor McGrath28:49

It doesn't look like we'll get many more questions, so we'll wrap up the Q&A. If you think of any afterward, get in touch and David or one of our process specialists will be happy to steer you in the right direction. If you'd like a one-to-one call with one of our migration experts, or a free personalized demo, you can arrange it on our website. When the webinar ends you'll be invited to fill in a very quick survey. Thank you for your time today, and thank you, Dave.

David Shanley30:33

Thank you very much. That's all for today, folks. Have a nice day and a nice week.