Keeping an External Form Link when Making Major Changes

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Chris Cashon

We are in the process of making some significant changes to a submission form that is accessed heavily through it's external link.  At the moment we've duplicated the existing form and are modifying it as the current form needs to stay live during the updates.  When the form is ready, what is the best way to migrate to the new form?  Do we need to make the same adjustments to the existing submission form in order to maintain the same external link?  The concern is many will have favorited the link to the current external form and we are trying to limit disruption.

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Sarah Dungey

Yes - you have to make the changes on the existing form if you want to ensure the link stays the same. 

I sometimes will clone the existing form just so I have a clean copy to look back at just in case something gets weird, but I'll make the changes in the live form to keep the links to same. 

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Anna Giacobbe

Hey Chris Cashon,

You have two options here! 

  1. Make the changes manually: I know it may seem daunting especially if there are MANY changes (been there!), but this will ensure that your existing/live external link remains the same. While this does take time and you have to proceed with caution to replicate the same changes, in doing this method, I found small things that needed changing along the way. Always helps to have two screens to do this (one with the original form and the other with the changes you want) to compare side-by-side, and it also helps to ask a peer to review the changes for you in case something was missed!

  2. Inform users of the new link: If there are far too many changes and it might be risky to try and replicate all of them, you can simply unpublished the live form and inform all your users about the new link. This could mean asking them to edit their bookmark/favorites, sending both an email and informing colleagues over any work messaging tool you use (i.e. Teams, Slack, etc.). If the link exists on an intranet site, you can ask those admins to change it as well. Another option you can do to ensure all folks are aware is one that we did in a similar situation: on the live form that you no longer wish to use, remove all the pages/questions and include a description/question that links to the new form and advise them of the change; the only downfall of this is that folks will likely still enter their name/email to get to that question (even though it might be in the description) and they can technically still "submit" the form just with no info. Eventually over time, you'll see that no one is using this form anymore and you can then unpublish it and potentially delete it! 
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