forms.carleton.ca – end of service

As you know, we are decommissioning the old forms.carleton.ca web server (which we are going to refer to here as Forms). There are two reasons for this:

• we are moving away from anything that relies on Red Hat 6 technology as this will soon become unsupported
• and the extra security afforded by Forms is now available on all websites under the carleton.ca (that is, sites in the cuTheme, CCMS, and Framework templates)

What is the plan?

We aim to close down Forms by the end of May, 2025. This means we will move your forms to your main website before that date. The protection that was provided for files associated with forms (files such as transcripts, resumés, and portfolios) is now recreated because anyone wishing to access those files has to be on VPN to do so.

What do you have to do?

There are three things you have to do in this process – plus a fourth optional step:

1. Look through your list of forms on forms.carleton.ca to see if they are needed
2. Let us know which forms (if any) you would like moved over.
3. Build a page to house the forms we move over.
   Then, where necessary, complete the fourth step:
4. Download the CSV files listing all previous entries as these cannot be migrated with the forms.

What are the steps to do this?

Look through your list of forms

1. Firstly, log into your site on the Forms server in order to view your list of forms. (That link looks like this: https://forms.carleton.ca/MY-SITE/wp-admin – just change your site name.)
2. If you are not sure, check to see if every one of your forms is still in use. You can see when a form was last used by clicking on it in the back end of the site and looking at the list of entries. Click on the most recent to review its entry date.

Let us know which forms you want moved

1. Send us a list of all forms you want moved (if any). This can be a list of the form name(s) or of URLs where the forms are used.
2. If you do not need any forms moved let us know so we can record that fact.

Prepare for a new home for your forms

1. Build a page for each form you still want visitors to your site to be able to see and use. Please do not publish these pages.
2. Once we have moved the forms over you can place the form into the page.
3. Send us a list of the new page URLs (this is so we can redirect visitors who have bookmarked the old pages to the new pages).

Download all entries for each form

This is an optional step. We cannot migrate entries for your forms to their new location. However, you can download these entries as CSV files and store them on One Drive, via Teams, or on the W:// drive.

1. Log into your site on the Forms server – https://forms.carleton.ca/MY-SITE/wp-admin
2. In the backend, hover over/click on Forms > Import/Export and then on the page that loads, select the form for which you wish to download the entries.
3. Next check the Select All box, and then click the Save Download File.
4. Save the file somewhere preferably accessible to you and to your team members.

What we will do

We will make sure all forms you request are copied over to the website where you would like them to live moving forward.

We will also prepare with colleagues in ITS to redirect your old page address to the new location for each form.

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Note 1

The simplest solution is to place a page in the same position as its equivalent on Forms. For example, if you have a page here at the moment:

forms.carleton.ca/institute -for-studies/registration

then the best location for it would be on your public-facing website here:

carleton.ca/institute-for-studies/registration

However, you might not be moving a form to a site with a similar address. As long as you know the address of your new page you can let us know that. For example, it might be that you have multiple sites in your unit and you want to move it to a specific place:

forms.carleton.ca/institute-for-studies/registration

can redirect to

carleton.ca/educational-learning-research/registration

You just have to let us know the address.