Form triggers and the ready-made starter and leaver rules

Many requests arrive as forms: a new starter, a leaver, access to a shared mailbox. With the form triggers, the rule picks up where the form stops: the customer's approver says yes, and the account is made, the groups set and the ticket noted, with nobody typing anything twice.

The two form triggers#

In the rule builder, the Forms group of the trigger picker has:

• A form is submitted: a service request is sent (from the portal, or raised by your team for a contact), an information request is answered, or a sign-off is signed by everyone.
• A form answer is approved: a service request whose approval steps all said yes, or an information request whose answers your team marked complete. A request with no approval steps is approved at once and never fires this trigger.

Each trigger has its own settings:

Each submission fires once. A catalogue form sent as an information request becomes a service request when it comes back, and only the service request fires.

The rule gets the form's customer, its ticket and the person who sent it as the contact, so every customer action and placeholder works as for other triggers.

Answers in placeholders#

With forms chosen, the placeholder menu lists their questions by name. Each answer comes three ways:

There are also {{form.name}}, {{form.reference}}, {{form.submitted_by}}, {{form.submitted_at}}, {{form.ticket}}, {{form.approved_by}} (approved trigger) and {{form.signed_by}} (sign-offs).

So {{form.picked.leaver.upn}} hands a Microsoft 365 step the exact account the customer chose, and {{form.values.last_day}} gives Wait a date. A secret answer never reaches a rule, and a picker only ever offers the customer's own users, groups, mailboxes, contacts and devices. A question that allows several choices fills a placeholder as "A, B", and the group, mailbox access and create user steps work through each name in turn.

Conditions on answers#

Under If, the form's questions are offered as conditions, tested by their type: numbers (more or less than, set or not), dates (before, after, within the next days), choices and yes or no (is, is not), and everything else as text. You can also test the form's name, kind and where it came from. For example: only run when Department is Finance, or when the Start date is within the next 14 days.

Wait until a date#

Wait has a mode for forms: Until a date, from a placeholder such as {{form.values.last_day}}, at a time you choose, in the customer's business hours time zone unless you pick one. A date already passed carries on at once. See Actions.

The four ready-made form rules#

The service catalogue has four forms made for rules, and the template gallery's Forms group has a rule for each. The forms start unpublished, so customers see nothing until you publish them in Settings > Service catalogue.

Each rule starts with Ask for approval of the customer's approvers (from their approval matrix), so nothing changes until one of them agrees, even when the request needed no approval of its own. Like every template, they open in dry run: send a test form, read the run, then turn dry run off. Each needs the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant connected and its form published. See Microsoft 365 steps and the leaver bundle.

Tip: Test a form trigger with Test in the builder: it lists recent service requests, answered information requests and signed sign-offs to try the rule against.

Sales triggers#

In the MSP edition, the Sales group of the trigger picker also starts rules from the CRM:

Conditions cover the lead's source, status, owner, value and company, the deal's stage, pipeline, owner, value and monthly amount, and the task's owner. The actions Give the lead or deal to and Add a sales task go with them, and Notify people can tell The lead's or deal's owner.

The gallery's Sales group has three ready-made rules: an enquiry gets a task to reply today and its owner is told; a deal going cold gets a task for its owner; a won deal gets a hand-over task. See My sales day and activities.

Related#

• Building a rule
• Conditions and placeholders
• Templates, import and export