FormSpring Blog » New Products/Features

New Multilingual Support Text On Forms

ryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:10 +0000

We’ve been getting quite a few requests recently for international translations of our error messages, buttons, and other places where text is used but can’t be edited by the form owner. We are happy to announce that the wait is over, and you can now translate this text into 12 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Portuguese. We may add additional languages in the future if the demand is there.

You can enable this feature by going to the Settings page for your form, choosing a new language from the drop-down menu on that page, and then clicking on “Save Settings”.

The actual text of your form will not be translated, as that is up to you. What we are translating includes the Submit, Next and Previous buttons; the supporting text on Name and Address fields; error messages and the default thank you message.

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How to CC FormSpring Receipts to Other E-mail Addresses

ryan — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:10:58 +0000

A common request we’ve had in recent months was that we add the ability for account owners to have their receipts automatically go to other e-mail addresses. Receipts already go to the admin(s) on the account, but often the person in a company that actually needs to see the receipt is in the accounting department and doesn’t even have access to log into FormSpring.

Well, you asked and now you have received. FormSpring is happy to introduce a new feature you will find under Account Settings > Billing.

On the billing page, click on “Modify Receipt Recipients” and you will see a box where you can type in e-mail addresses, one per line. When you are done, click on “Save Receipt Recipients” and every e-mail addresses you typed in will now receive your monthly FormSpring receipts.

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FormSpring for TypePad Integration

chris — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:07:51 +0000

TypePad is the world’s largest paid blogging platform and easy to use for small businesses to boot. And as more and more small businesses who have turned to blogging are quickly learning, having the ability to capture leads, information requests, and other calls to action from any page on your blog is an important and almost required function. Hence the reason we created the new FormSpring Integration for TypePad.

Integration Features:

The FormSpring TypePad Integration allows you to create any kind of web form for your TypePad blog and quickly add it as a widget. You can collect data from any page on your blog and also use the same form across multiple TypePad blogs.

Watch Our Quick Intro Video For More Information:

What It Means for Me:

The new TypePad Integration allows anyone using a TypePad blog to easily collect data online using a FormSpring form. This enables businesses and organizations an easy way to incorporate “Request a Quote” forms, have persistent “Contact Us” or even help promote contest and giveaway entry forms from any page on your blog. You can also use one of our other integrations like, FreshBooks or Highrise to mange invoices or keep track of contacts. This is perfect to create an all-around lead generation system, right from your TypePad blog.

How Do I Get Started?

Visit our TypePad Integration page to learn more. If you are new to FormSpring learn more about us by visiting our What It Does page or sign up for an account today and discover how you can turn your web forms into powerful lead management tool right from your TypePad blog!Recent Posts:

New Security Features

ade — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:11:51 +0000

We recently incorporated a handful of security features to the application. While most of the security measures we employ are behind-the-scenes, we wanted to highlight some of the more visible changes to explain why we made them. I should note that we haven’t made these changes because of any particular incident, but rather an attempt to proactively prevent problems before they occur.

Blocking Brute Force Logins

One of the most common threats against web applications is a script that repeatedly attempts to guess user passwords, also known as a brute-force attack. It’s a relatively simple attack to deploy — a hacker can write a script to try commonly used passwords, dictionary words, or sequential combinations of letters in order to find a valid password. Most servers and desktop computers have built-in protection against this kind of attack, but that’s generally not true for web applications. A brute force attack can usually run against a web application for days, even weeks or months.

There are a handful of ways to prevent brute force attacks. Desktop computers usually lock out an account for a set period of time after a series of invalid password attempts. This isn’t a great solution for web applications because someone might be trying to crack an account that a legitimate user is trying to access. Servers can also temporarily or permanently add the client IP address to a blacklist to prevent access to any services. This isn’t ideal either because there are so many cases where users share a single IP address. We might end up blocking an entire company or university because of one attacker, or just simply a single person who can’t remember his password and is making dozens of invalid attempts.

What we found to provide the best balance of security and usability, was the usage of a CAPTCHA image after a number of invalid password attempts. A user will need to enter the CAPTCHA code in addition to a password until a correct one is found. This should sufficiently block automated brute force attacks, without preventing valid users from logging in.

Password Strength Checker

Even with protection against brute force attacks, it’s important to ensure that all passwords have enough complexity to ensure that they can’t be easily guessed. The need to avoid commonly used passwords is best illustrated by The Plague:

We deployed a password strength checker to help users separate weak passwords from strong ones. We’ve added this to account passwords as well as data encryption passwords, with much more stringent checks applied to the latter. The password checker rates each password, with a higher score applied to those passwords with a good mix of letters, numbers and special characters. While it’s not perfect, it’s much better than a simple enforcement of minimum character length.

Reset Password Token

The last visible change we made was to the password recovery workflow. Previously, if you used the reset password link, we would email you a temporary password, and prompted you to change it once you logged in. With the change, you’re emailed a password reset token that needs to be entered before allowing you to change your password. It’s a subtle change, but what it does is prevent a denial-of-service attack where someone can repeatedly reset your password without your consent. The attacker wouldn’t be able to retrieve the temporary password without access to your email account, but you would be forced to use the temporary password to log in — an annoying inconvenience if done once, but a major pain if it was done over and over.

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New Notification/Confirmation E-mail Features

ryan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:18:33 +0000

If you’re the type of dedicated FormSpring user that logs into the site every day, you may have noticed we went live with some minor changes Thursday. If not, well, we won’t hold it against you. Log in now and you’ll see we’ve made some long-requested changes to our notification and confirmation emails.

You can now set a custom “from” address on your notification emails (which are the emails sent to you, the form owner). Traditionally, these emails have had “from” addresses that matched up to the email address of whoever was submitting the form, or, if the form didn’t have an email field on it, the “from” address was “noreply@formspring.com”. Now, the “email from” field on your notification emails has a drop-down menu where you can choose an Email field from your form, “noreply@formspring.com,” or you can type in any email address you want to use.

This should be good for those who need their notification emails to come from a specific address for compatibility with third-party software.

By the same token, you have a similar option with confirmation emails (which are sent to the person filling out the form). Confirmation emails used to automatically go to the first email address field on your form. Now, if you have multiple email address fields on your form, you can choose the field you want emails to go to from a list of all the email fields on your form.

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FormSpring Salesforce.com Integration

chris — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:00:33 +0000

Salesforce.com is one of the largest CRM solutions in the world boasting nearly 55,000 company subscriptions and 1.5 million individual subscribers. Our FormSpring Salesforce.com Integration allows organizations an easy way to collect data and manage leads and contacts.

Integration Features:

Our integration allows you to create web forms for any standard or custom Salesforce object, build flexible Web-To-Lead and Web-To-Case forms, update existing records, attach file uploads, and connect objects with more than one object in a single submission.

Watch Our Brief Introduction Video To Learn More:

What It Means for Me:

Our Salesforce.com integration allows organizations an easy and convenient way to take data they collect online and integrate with their CRM processes. Eliminate the need for manually adding data or importing through a cumbersome import. Also, with FormSpring’s advanced functionality like Smart Routing and Payment Integrations, you can have a much more flexible and customizable data collection and management process.

How Do I Get Started?

Visit our Salesforce Integration page to learn more. If you are new to FormSpring learn more about us by visiting our What It Does page or sign up for an account today and discover how you can turn your web forms into powerful lead and contact management tools!Recent Posts:

FormSpring ExactTarget Email Integration

chris — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:05:53 +0000

ExactTarget has built a great business by providing an email marketing application with features like triggered sends, dynamic content, and powerful tracking tools. Our FormSpring Exact Target Integration allows organizations to use the powerful features in both FormSpring and ExactTarget to collect online data and automatically integrate into your ExactTarget email marketing campaigns.

Integration Features:

Our integration allows you to add a contact to the ExactTarget subscriber database, including information for any custom attributes. You can optionally add the subscriber to one or more subscription lists. You can also optionally send the subscriber one or more triggered emails.

Watch Our Brief Introduction Video To Learn More

What It Means for Me:

Our integration with ExactTarget allows you an easy, cost effective way to collect data online using any type of FormSpring web form and automatically kick that data into your marketing campaigns. You can integrate your online forms with landing pages and micro sites for specific email campaigns. A great integration would be adding a “subscribe now” button to any form, like an online order form, and inserting customers into a email campaign using ExactTarget’s triggered sends functionality.

How Do I Get Started?

Visit our ExactTarget Integration page to learn more. If you are new to FormSpring learn more about us by visiting our What It Does page or sign up for an account today and see how you can improve your email marketing with FormSpring web forms and ExactTarget!Recent Posts:

Introducing New Data & E-mail Features

ryan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:00:57 +0000

Users now have the ability to view submission “meta data” in the columns in the Data > Summary view, including Unique ID, IP Address, Browser, and Location (for iPhone submissions). To enable these columns, click on the Data tab of your form and then on the blue folder icon.

Check the boxes for the columns you wish to display on your Data Summary page and click “OK.”

These columns will now be displayed.

Another new Data feature is the ability to search by Unique ID or IP Address. You can do this by clicking on the Search icon in the Data view and then choosing Unique ID or IP Address from the drop down menu.

Finally, the Unique ID and Submission Time can now be inserted into notification and confirmation emails, as well as custom messages. You can insert these by using the rich text editor for these messages and clicking on the Unique ID or Submission Time links located at the bottom of the editor in order to insert the proper variables for this info into your message.

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New Field Types

ade — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:37:41 +0000

We just released a new version of our form builder, and are happy to announce seven new field types that should greatly enhance the ease of collecting and validating data online.

Name, Address and Phone Number Fields

We now have the ability to create fields specifically to collect name, address and phone numbers. The best part is that you can now ensure that addresses and phone numbers are formatted in a uniform way, and that users filling out your form don’t accidentally omit a digit from a phone number or zip code.

We’ve also included validation and formatting rules for some of our friends outside of the United States – you can create address and phone fields with formatting specific to Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Matrix Field

The matrix field was probably our most frequently requested feature. This field will let you setup Likert scales like you see in the screenshot above, or ranking questions (e.g. “Rank the following movies on a scale of 1-5″), both of which will be especially handy for quickly building online surveys or feedback forms.

Credit Card Field

The new credit card field will be helpful on order forms to validate credit card numbers before submission, helping ensure that users don’t mistype numbers. We have validation rules built in for Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club and JCB cards. This field also works nicely with our existing Authorize.Net and First Data payment integration.

Number Field

The new number field is great for order forms too in that if you need users to type in a price, quantity or something similar, you can make sure they enter in a valid number. You can also restrict number fields to a minimum value and/or a maximum value, round values to a set number of decimal places, or attach a currency symbol. Number fields can also be represented using a slider widget so users can select a value along a pre-defined range.

Description Area

Lastly, we’ve added description areas which aren’t really fields, but content areas where you can add text, images, video, or any custom HTML. They’re similar to the content areas within sections, but can fit inline in multi-column forms next to other fields to help you better customize the form.

We hope you enjoy the new functionality. Let us know what you think in the comments or the forums.Recent Posts:

New Form Builder Layout

ryan — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:31:30 +0000

Hopefully most of you have had a chance to log in to your account and take a look at the changes to the form builder that we recently launched. Once you do you will notice that all the same features you’ve grown to love are still there, but we’ve moved a few things around a bit to make room for our ever-growing feature list. The old layout was holding us back a bit, as we were running out of room to add new field types and features. Also, the form builder really wasn’t wide enough to easily work with multi-column forms.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the left-hand menu is gone, replaced by a four-button menu at the bottom of the form builder. The buttons are “Add Field,” “Add Section,” “Form Extras,” and “Rearrange Fields.” Also, there are three new tabs at the top of the form builder called “Forms,” “Style Templates,” and “Users.”

If you hit the Add Field button, you’ll see that all the old fields are still there, although we renamed Text Fields to Short Answer Fields and Text Areas to Long Answer fields. The Add Section and Rearrange Fields buttons act exactly the same as they used to be.

The Form Extras button is where you’ll find the settings for Layout, Form Progress, the Submit Button and the CAPTCHA. Here you can change the layout of the form from single column to multi-column, you can turn the Page Progress Indicator or Save & Resume link on or off, you can change the text of the Submit Button, or you can turn the CAPTCHA on or off.

Looking back to the top of the form builder, the Forms button is basically what the Home button used to be. It takes you to a list of all the forms currently in your account. The Style Templates button takes you to a list of all your Style Templates. Finally, the Users button is where you go to add additional users to your account or change the permissions that your users have.

Those are the main changes we’ve made for now. Watch for updates in the future, where we take advantage of our new layout to add some long-awaited new features!

Tell us what you think of the new changes in the commens below!Recent Posts:

FormSpring Blog » New Products/Features

New Multilingual Support Text On Forms

Other Interesting Posts

How to CC FormSpring Receipts to Other E-mail Addresses

Other Interesting Posts

FormSpring for TypePad Integration

Integration Features:

What It Means for Me:

How Do I Get Started?

Other Related Posts

New Security Features

Blocking Brute Force Logins

Password Strength Checker

Reset Password Token

Other Related Posts

New Notification/Confirmation E-mail Features

Other Interesting Posts

FormSpring Salesforce.com Integration

Integration Features:

What It Means for Me:

How Do I Get Started?

Other Related Posts

FormSpring ExactTarget Email Integration

Integration Features:

What It Means for Me:

How Do I Get Started?

Other Interesting Posts

Introducing New Data & E-mail Features

Other Related Posts

New Field Types

Other Related Posts

New Form Builder Layout

Other Related Posts