Discover how a Canadian university unified its forms and workflows with Cognito Forms, resulting in 87% faster form development time and $30k in annual savings. 

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In January 2025, Brandon Schwartz and David Brookwell-Reuber were tasked with unifying the university’s disjointed form infrastructure. “We are both Applications Analysts within our IT department. What that means is we’re in charge of identifying areas within the university where processes could be improved.”

Many of the university’s forms were previously built in SharePoint with custom JavaScript. This meant form requests or changes were time-consuming and led to “people just using whatever worked for them or whatever they’d been given,” recalls Brandon. This resulted in over 400 active forms, scattered across multiple platforms, “breaking down once in a while, or needing changes because they weren’t properly built in the first place.”   Things reached a breaking point when a simple request to add four fields to four different forms turned into hours of programming work. Brandon and David knew something had to change.

What began as an effort to standardize forms quickly evolved into a complete digital transformation. Today, Brandon and David are eliminating hard-to-manage and scattered forms throughout the university. By standardizing the platform the university uses and reducing form-building time, the team of two is empowering staff to manage their own forms and processes. This reallocates valuable IT resources to strategic initiatives, such as process improvements or automation, rather than routine maintenance.

The Challenge

With just two people on their team within the IT department, Brandon and David faced three critical challenges:

Scattered forms creating chaos

Each university department did “whatever worked for them.” This led to:

• Google Forms with no automation.
• SharePoint forms requiring custom JavaScript.
• Jira forms with limited logic and calculations.
• PDF forms that users had to manually download, fill out, scan, and email back.

Why this matters: It became increasingly difficult for their team of two to track platform limits, fix issues, and remember where forms were stored.

Time-consuming maintenance impacting efficiency

The true cost of their system became clear when Brandon and David got a simple request. They needed to add four fields to three different forms. “We had to write custom JavaScript for each individual change. It would’ve taken hours of work,” shares Brandon. Adding those four fields really meant 36 separate changes (4 fields x 3 forms x 3 views).

• Why this matters: Every hour spent on form maintenance was an hour not spent on strategic initiatives.

Frustration across departments

Because changes were complex, Brandon and David’s backlog kept growing. Form updates were taking three to four months to complete. "A lot of people using SharePoint forms actually dreaded asking for updates,” David notes. These delays stalled projects, frustrated staff, and left important requests in limbo.

• Why this matters: Slow response times were hurting the IT department’s reputation. As a result, other departments chose to accept broken processes instead of asking for fixes.

Why Cognito Forms?

The university first looked to standardize using Jira Forms. However, Brandon and David soon realized it would be “like Google Forms with fewer features.” They needed something radically different.

After evaluating several options, including their current platforms and several paid alternatives, Cognito Forms stood out for a few key reasons:

Simplicity without sacrificing power

The university needed a solution that was easy to use for both IT professionals and non-technical staff. “SharePoint requires someone to write JavaScript. With Cognito Forms, I can select my field type and add logic with just a few clicks.”

• Cognito Forms’ intuitive conditional logic builder transformed complex logic into plain English. This made it much easier for anyone to add logic to a form.
• The platform’s ease of use meant some non-technical users could maintain their own forms.

Enterprise-level security

As a publicly funded institution, the university had strict security requirements. Every software purchase has to pass a privacy and security assessment.

• “Cognito Forms shared all the security documentation we needed without any fuss,” shares David.
• Sensitive data could be handled securely while the platform remained user-friendly for non-technical users. “The platform met every one of our needs.”

Pricing that made sense

Before pitching Cognito Forms as the university’s best option, Brandon and David built a business case. They proved that the Enterprise plan would provide a quick ROI in labor costs.

• When Brandon calculated the ROI of Cognito Forms, the math was simple. “Cognito Forms would pay for itself if it saved just three weeks of my time.” After testing a single form, the results were clear: “Cognito Forms was going to save us even more than three weeks per year.”
• Cognito Forms also offered a licensing model that worked well for the university. Unlike Jira, full user licenses weren’t required for authenticated form submissions. Select employees could be added as authenticated guest users at a lower subscription price than full-access users.

Strategic Implementation

Brandon and David chose to tackle the university’s most complex processes first. They saw it as a challenge to show the full impact the form builder could have. “In just two hours, we converted an entire SharePoint form to Cognito Forms using only a free trial. It was ready-to-go with logic and looked beautiful,” shares Brandon. Management soon agreed that Cognito Forms was the right fit for the university.

After securing the budget and security approval, Brandon and David created a three-phase plan. Their goal? Migrate all 400 forms to Cognito Forms, modernizing every form across the university.

• Phase 1: Google Forms elimination
  • “We first identified 62 Google Forms to be the first to get rid of,” states Brandon. Automation for these forms wasn’t possible. They also couldn’t integrate with other systems. “These forms were frequently used or have caused us problems in the past.” The focus was on quick wins to rebuild trust with other departments.
• Phase 2: Migrating all SharePoint forms
  • SharePoint forms were much more complex. The transfer to Cognito Forms would take a lot more time. The migration of these forms was more as needed. “When requests about these forms came in, we told staff they were just going to get a new form.” This switch eliminated complex programming and saved a lot of time and effort in the long run.
• Phase 3: Increasing security with a customer portal
  • Once all 400 forms were moved to Cognito Forms, the next step was clear. Limit internal forms, such as budget approvals and recruitment requisitions. Brandon shares, “We’re excited to implement a customer portal. It will let us fully restrict internal forms.” This would give all 3,500+ staff a secure portal to submit forms and track workflows.

The Solution

Three key forms showcase the real change MacEwan University achieved. Brandon and David simplified these complex forms, without sacrificing functionality or compliance.

Financial variance reporting

The finance department’s variance reporting form was hard to manage. It needed around 50 conditional comment fields — one for each budget line item. A developer added or updated fields one at a time using custom JavaScript. Simple changes to the name of a field often led to hours of tedious troubleshooting.

“In Cognito Forms, it’s easy,” shares Brandon. The new form includes:

• Conditional logic to show extra comment fields only if variances go above set thresholds. These fields are also only required when they are visible.
• Automatic calculations comparing forecasted vs. budgeted amounts.
• Custom branding with consistent formatting across all sections.

Recruitment requisitions

The university’s HR recruitment form is the foundation of the multi-departmental workflow. This form must change based on the employee type, budget status, and approval needs.

The new form:

• Shows fields and sections based on employee type: faculty, staff, or management.
• Populates employee data, like email addresses and position details, automatically. These pull from an imported list with over 3,500 employees.
• Routes submissions to the right approver without manual intervention. The workflow skips budget approval if users say that the position is already budgeted.

Facilities requisitions

The facilities team maintained two separate forms. One for projects under $250,000 and another for projects above that threshold.  “We eventually sat down with the team and offered to combine them into a single form,” David recalls.

The new form now:

• Automatically calculates the total project cost from individual line items.
• Simplifies the user experience by showing only relevant sections based on project value.
• Routes approvals based on the calculated thresholds.
• Ensures compliance with budget authorities.

Results & Impact

Since adopting Cognito Forms, the university has experienced a complete transformation. Form processes are streamlined and trust between IT and other departments has been rebuilt.

87% faster form development time

On average, a form that once took 2.5 business days to build in SharePoint, now takes just 2.5 hours in Cognito Forms. The impact isn’t limited to new forms. Basic updates that once took hours now take only minutes to set up. Brandon and David now focus on strategic projects, like improving and automating processes.

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$30k saved annually in labor costs

The university avoided a significant staffing expense by drastically reducing form development time. Their team calculated that Cognito Forms saves them 1,040 hours per year in time-consuming programming. This time in labor saves them around $30k per year.

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Increased trust in IT

The rapid turnaround has completely changed how departments view IT support. What used to take three to four months now only takes hours or days. This change encourages more proactive requests for new forms and updates. As David says, “When our users saw we could complete their requests almost instantly, it really boosted our team’s credibility.”

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Empowered non-technical staff

The most significant cultural shift? Departments are taking ownership of their own forms. As Brandon recalls, “Within one day, one of our HR staff was doing complex logic to show or hide fields. I didn’t teach her anything. She just went with it.” This not only empowers each department but also frees up time to focus on higher-value projects.

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Best Practices Learned

Through their implementation journey, Brandon and David developed strategies that other universities can apply.

• Use integrations strategically: Connect Cognito Forms to existing systems. This helps you update and simplify the user experience without disrupting existing workflows.
• Focus on the end user experience: Simple, easy-to-use forms reduce IT support requests and increase adoption. Design your forms to hide irrelevant information whenever possible.
• Empower users gradually: Screen-share during virtual meetings to show staff how easy it is to make simple text or date changes on their own. As comfort and adoption grow, train teams on advanced features. “Our goal is to let departments update their forms on their own,” says Brandon.

Up Next

Brandon and David are now preparing to launch a client portal for over 3,500 employees that limits access to sensitive forms. It will also auto-fill user data into submissions using Person Fields. This enables submissions to be made faster and more accurately.

The vision is a portal where employees can:

• Securely log in using SSO or email verification.
• Access one single hub for new forms and past submissions.
• Submit new forms for any HR or academic department processes.
• Track the current workflow status of their past submissions at any time.

Ready to transform your university’s forms?

Stop spending unnecessary time maintaining and fixing forms. Like MacEwan University, you can reduce form development time, save thousands in labor, and empower your staff to manage their own processes – without writing a single line of code.

Discover how Cognito Forms can help you eliminate manual processes, empower staff, and free up your team for strategic initiatives.