Sitecore XM Cloud Forms - What changed since the launch

Hi Team,

I had an opportunity to take part in "Collaborative Program – XMC Forms Early Access" with Sitecore team to play around XM Cloud Sitecore Forms along with few of my colleagues before 6 months, When forms were not released officially, and the purpose was to review XM Cloud forms and provide feedback around it, We had great opportunity to connect with product Strategist Christa Marousek and Senior Product Manager Marina Kostopoulou on reoccurring meetings.

I along with my colleagues Brijesh Patel  Nimit Patel Varun Shringarpure  Jatin Prajapati Varalakshmi MD Gautam Bulchandani Irfan Masurkar and lot other folks explored Sitecore XMC Form and provided our inputs / feedbacks / improvement that we think should be part of public offering of Sitecore XMC Forms.

The objective of that program was to get inputs from partner community about forms and give them a feedback and improvise it.

In this blog i will highlight what feedback as a team we gave to Sitecore in exploring Sitecore XM Cloud Forms and how fast Sitecore is bringing those changes to production and for larger community to use, So it is going to be like highlights of "Half Year Anniversary" of XM Cloud Forms and the improvisation in those time.

We focused mainly on following topics

Sitecore XMC Forms Early Access Evolution Criteria.

Basically, We looked at the XMC Form from end user perspective and decided couple of common use cases to start with which were as follow.

1) Looking at the usability and ease of use of the forms

2) Real life use case and compare that with this new forms

3) Execution of the Use cases

4) Trying different validations and form styling etc.

5) Use multiple forms on the same page

6) Create and use multi steps form

7) Creating a web hook and configure that to a form

8) See google captcha integration

9) Deploy the page on vercel and test forms

10) Check file uploads

11) Feedback loop with Sitecore team  

Feedbacks which were shared with Sitecore XMC Forms team at that time and how do forms look now

Feedback we provided THEN	How does it look NOW
Users were not able to access forms until they were made admin	This limitation is not present anymore
We discussed with Sitecore team that once form is activated there is no way to change the form, but in real life scenario we will need to change the form, we can not create new versions every time.	This ability was recently rollout by Sitecore, Check the XM Cloud Changelog , So now changes to the active forms are immediately available in XM Cloud Pages, and are automatically applied to all live instances of that form.
Validation were getting fired but we did not see from where we can customize the validation error messages.	This feature was rolled out in February, Have a look at XM Cloud Changelog
File upload were not possible, We gave this feedback how to have file upload in the form, we could not find it.	This feature was released around 10th April, Check the release notes XM Cloud Changelog They released it and now in S3 bucket files are stored for 24 hours, Read more on where the files are stored on This Blog
You can not hook any events of onchange or onblur with those form controls, If a developer wants to wire some events on client side, it is not possible.	Not exact same, but there was a feature called "Logic" which was added around 19th March which enables to create dynamic forms containing fields that display conditionally, Depending on the values entered to other form fields, This creates a personalized and interactive experience, Improving engagement and the changes of successful completion of the form. Check out XM Cloud Changelog , Know its detail workings on This Blog
Previously, i needed to go into every form and every control to style it, is there a way where we can create global styles or apply CSS?	There was a feature released along with file upload feature on 10th April called "Style Builder" XM Cloud Changelog using which now user can create two types of styles 1) Visual styles - built with the Styles builder 2) CSS styles - created by saving the style as CSS code.

Apart from above points, There were further inputs which currently are not available in XMC Forms, and which could be part of future releases (We do not have any confirmation from XMC team but pointers were shared with them so their product team can look into this), Following are those.

1) If dropdown has many options, User should be able to type the option, Instead of long scroll to find.

2) Position of the Success and Failure message can not be determined, It comes at the top all the time.

3) There is regex validation but it only works for single line text field & email. 

4) Cascading dropdowns are not available.

What else changed apart from above since the launch?

Below are the visuals of before and after change that happened since the XMC forms launch in January 2024

THEN : In early access the form UI was not refreshed to its full capabilities, also icon sets were different and there was no conditional logic functionality available, as shown in below screenshot

NOW : If you compare this screenshot with the NOW version below, you will see that the UI is refreshed and "styling" tab is renamed with "Options", Because now that options tab contains lot more than only styles, and upper icon list now have an option called "Logic" which is responsible to hide and show different controls depending on field values, in table above you can read more about it on the link given.

THEN :  In template library section, There was only four options or four categories as shown below, also UI of the button arrangement was different.

NOW : Now, We also get the option called "Shared" that means now templates can be shared with  other environments in your organization, also change in button layout can be seen too.

THEN : In initial release, Submit button was not mandatory to be present on the form, but in the new releases the submit button is part of default controls, that means, At start while creating a form, even if you drag and drop any element on the form, submit button will automatically be available along with it, The reason behind is, without submit button there is no purpose of the form

NOW : You can see that submit is part of it by default, as soon as you drag & drop any control.

Also, If you delete the submit button, the editor will show nice little warning about it, As shown below 

THEN : We had site analytics but now we also get the form analytics too, so you can also hook different events to collect analytics of forms, There is going to be lot more into analytics events based on the context id of your instance, but that is for the future

NOW : 

And last but not the least, as latest as 19th June 2024,

"You can now choose to only make a form available on specific sites in an environment. For example, if your environment includes five separately branded sites, you can create an appropriately branded form for each of those sites. To use this feature, configure the Form available on setting in the form editor, even after a form has been activated. If you don't specify anything for this option, the form will be available on all of your sites." Read more Here

As i write this blog, new features are still being added and forms are getting better and better.

Conclusion

As you can see how fast those feedbacks and inputs were taken into considerations and how fast they were rolled out in public releases, Sitecore XMC has been one of the platform of frequent releases and fast feature rollouts and kudos to the entire team of Sitecore XMC Forms and Sitecore XMC.

Sitecore XMC Form is one of the essential offering and with ease of use by simply drag/drop you could create your branded forms and super power your lead capturing and lead generation.