We’ve been heads-down building a self-service form system for a client with 10,000+ portal users. Claris Studio got us 80% of the way there fast—forms look good, security works, hard for users to break things.
Then we hit the wall.
Approval workflows within Studio were more complex than we needed. Form versioning is a bit messy (no copy/paste, really?). We were duplicating entire forms just to archive submissions. Every conditional show/hide rule meant writing more code than the task should require.
We could keep forcing it. Or we could step back and ask: what’s Studio actually great at?
The pivot: Use Studio for what it does brilliantly—fast, secure form creation. Then hand off to a custom processor that handles everything else: approvals, versioning, PDF generation, archiving.
One entry point. One authentication layer. One simple Connect flow to pass the data.
Now the client can spin up new forms without our help. And we’re not maintaining duplicate
Studio forms every time they need a new approval path.
Sometimes the best architecture isn’t the obvious one.
More soon…
