With our CMS vendor’s upcoming retirement of the Form Assets in 2026, the Digital Strategy and Services team recommends switching to Google Forms, as they are easy to use and widely recognized. While UMC does not directly support the Google suite of products on campus, we want to provide some best practices for implementing their use on your CMS website.
You may choose to use other third-party form services, but our staff will be unable to provide assistance or recommendations for any vendor beyond Google Forms. Please be cautious of third-party services and ensure any chosen service respects user privacy and security. Google Forms has been vetted and approved by our staff in these regards.
Refer to Google’s Instructions
Google provides a lot of documentation and instructions for Google Forms. Use Google’s instructions to help you set up and maintain your forms. Refer to it regularly to keep up with any updates or changes Google makes.
Helpful Instructions
- Add others who need access to submissions as collaborators.
- Set up form submission notifications.
- Turn off the sign-in requirement if the form will be used by an external audience.
Use the Michigan Tech Form Template
We have created a standard Google Form template named “Michigan Tech Form Template”. Start your form with this template to keep a clean, standard look across the University. We included a link to Google’s documentation in the template as well.
You can also get to the templates by hovering over the arrow to the right of “Google Forms” in the +New menu on Google Drive and selecting “From a template.”
Link to the Google Form Rather Than Embedding
Do not embed the Google Form into a CMS webpage. Instead, link to the form so it opens within Google Forms itself.
- Embedded forms often experience technical issues that lead to poor user experience, frustration, and possibly users abandoning forms before they are complete.
- Embedded forms can have poor responsiveness and may cause issues for users on mobile devices.
- Scrolling issues may not allow users to see/fill out the whole form.
- Forms can be cut off if the embed code is not set up correctly.
- Due to different fonts and styling, the embedded form can look disjointed within the CMS webpage.
- Using iframes to embed content and functionality can create accessibility issues if not done correctly.
- A title attribute must be manually added to the iframe tag.
- If there are multiple iframes on a page, they must each have unique titles.
- You must test the iframe to ensure that users can tab into it and that the focus moves through logically.