Within the last couple of days, comments have been coming in indicating that forms that had been previously available were suddenly unavailable. It seems that Google has made some changes to Google Spreadsheets that has caused this to happen. Ever since we turned Google Apps on at Lincoln Public Schools it has been impossible to publish documents in such a way that the entire world could see them… with the exception of Forms. Up until now, a form could be published to gather content from anybody regardless of whether they were or were not an LPS staff person or student.
I don’t know when the change happened, but everyone is now limited to using forms with those who have an LPS login. That sounds simple enough, but that’s not all. If you have been experiencing problems with this, you may have noticed that you do not get a login screen when you try to access the form. Instead you have received a message indicating that you cannot access the form with no options to continue.
You've got to check the box
In order to fix this on your forms, you need to check a box in the form creation/edit screen that says “require lps.org sign-in to view this form”. Check that box and visitors will be able to login, then complete the form.
Q & A
Can’t you put it back the way it used to be?
I’m sorry, but we don’t have that option. We don’t have much control over this. We are unable with this product to say that Forms can be published while other file types are not. We are also unable to say that staff can do this but students can not. Until Google upgrades the application suite with those options we have to all live under restrictions that are a little tighter than we would like.
Could you have warned us that this was going to happen?
You can watch Google’s forums and blogs and get the same information we do. There is not generally any sort of heads-up on changes like this. From their perspective, they were probably fixing a pretty big hole in their security even if from other perspectives they were shutting off a feature that had been well used.
