Periodic Table of Office 365 welcomes Microsoft Forms

It was bound to happen: I had to play around with my Periodic Table to add a newly announced app.

Welcome to the [enterprise] party!

Microsoft launched Microsoft Forms in preview this week for commercial Office 365 tenants. Forms has been available in education tenants for a while, but it’s now available to first-release customers in enterprise tenants. (Also, it’s on the O365 roadmap.)

Forms is a tool for building out-of-the-box questionnaires, polls, surveys, things like that. It’s definitely an improvement over SharePoint surveys, especially since you can send Forms out to anybody, no login required. (I have a soft spot for SharePoint surveys, but they haven’t changed since SharePoint 2007.)

If you’d like a fair assessment on Forms, check out Thake’s Take.

There’s no official launch announcement from Microsoft, but you can read more about the app here. That means there’s no real added info on what Forms does differently (if anything) for commercial tenants, but for a brief overview of what it does/did in education tenants, here’s an ad they released last July.

More official info on Forms is available on Microsoft’s website.

Updating the Periodic Table

Forms is now a legitimate offering in Office 365 enterprise, so I’ve updated the Periodic Table of Office 365 to reflect that. I had to make some judgment calls along the way to fit it in. Adding Forms also gave me the opportunity to make some connections I had missed in the first version.

Unfortunately, the end result leaves us with a less periodic-table-looking product. But, having spent so much time in the SharePoint field, I’m plenty used to defending myself with a quick “function over form, people!”

Here’s what changed

1. Welcome Forms!
2. Forms and PowerApps both provide forms support, so I grouped them together with their own grouping box, called “Forms”. (That means PowerApps and Flow switched spots.)
3. This left that annoying white hole between Delve and Word Online even more noticeable. So I decided to move “Office Online” up a level and move”Business Application Platform” and “Forms” into “Office Online” space. (My OCD says thanks.)
4. I connected PowerPoint and Sway in a “Presentations” grouping. This was one of my main regrets in v1.0. Now I had an excuse to do so. (That means PowerPoint and OneNote switched spots.)

Final product

I will always keep the most up-to-date version here on the Jump to 365 blog. To ensure we don’t have multiple versions floating around, I won’t host the updated version in this post. Click either of the links in this paragraph.

Also, older versions will not be available. When I update the images on LinkedIn and my blog, it updates the source files, overwriting old versions. So no, the old version isn’t available.

Originally published on 17 June 2017 on LinkedIn.