Does Plumsail Forms for SharePoint or Public Web Forms have any offline capability? i.e. can users create forms and submit them when they have re-established connectivity?
Dear @abolam,
Thank you for this question. I don’t believe that’s currently possible, but that does seem reasonable to at least be able to export forms. I will bring this question to the dev team, and we’ll discuss potential implementation.
P.S. My bad, you can already do it. Simply Export unsaved form, this essentially save the progress. We also recommend keeping exported forms as backup. You can then import it on any machine and continue working, or save.
Hi, I have been struggling with a similar case. We have a customer that is using a lot of form registration in rural areas where there is a very bad wifi connection or none at all. We have developed a very simple solution using Microsoft Access on top of SharePoint Online. It works so that when there is not internet connection they can use the Access Database which is linked to SharePoint Online, if there is no connection the data is stored within Access and as soon as the connection comes up, it asks you if you want to sync the records online. We still use Plumsail Forms in all other cases, this is just an alternative to solve the offline part.
Hi all on this post, I should have probably updated my original post as I’ve not been clear on what I was asking - there are two separate use cases here:
- Can users of the Form Designer app work offline (which was answered by Nikita)
- Can end-users create and update forms offline (i.e. a SharePoint form) e.g. open a new form when they have connectivity, but somehow save it locally if they lost connection, and sync it back up when connectivity is possible again later.
Thank you shakonarson for suggesting an alternative using Access, however my end users are going to be mobile phone based, and so far I don’t see an Access app for mobile that will satisfy our needs. When you built the Access app for SharePoint Online, did you use a modern page so that it could work on mobile?
No we just used the Access Application on laptops. But we have been doing some tests with PowerApps and offline, it is interesting but not what we can but in operation at this point. It would be great if Plumsail Forms would have offline functionality you could use, for instance saving as XML and then uploading to SharePoint when online.
2 Likes
If that did work, you'd have to use the Microsoft Lists app - which using standard SharePoint forms does allow you to create items offline and have these sync back to SharePoint Online once connectivity is back. I'm not sure that the Plumsail forms app within your SharePoint site would be able to sync down locally to your machine in order to do this with Microsoft lists - @Nikita_Kurguzov - thoughts?
Hello @chris.cundy,
As of now, we don't have plans to implement an offline mode for SharePoint forms. However, if you require this functionality, we can offer paid support for adding it. If you are interested, please email us at support@plumsail.com.