Introducing Form Invitations — the missing half of every document workflow.
You've been here before.
You generate the document. You send it. You wait. Nothing comes back. So you send a follow-up. Still nothing. You call. They say they'll get to it. Another week passes. You send it again with a note that says "just circling back." You hate that you wrote "just circling back." Eventually something arrives — buried in an email thread, or as a scanned PDF image you have to squint at, or as a phone call where someone reads you their address while you type it into a spreadsheet and hope you got it right.
Then you update the record. Manually. And you generate the document again.
This is not a workflow. It is a tax. And it is collected from you every single week.
The problem has a name
Document automation solved half the problem. The hard half, honestly — the part where you take structured data and turn it into formatted, personalized documents at scale. That part works beautifully. DataPublisher does it in Word, connected to any data source, generating any document you need in seconds.
But there was always a second half that nobody built: the part where information flows back.
Every document you generate is, implicitly, a question. The enrollment form is asking: is this information correct? The vendor record is asking: are you still at this address? The contract is asking: do you agree? The listing is asking: does this match what you know?
We've been answering those questions with workarounds for thirty years. Email threads. PDF attachments sent back by fax or scan. Reply-to-this-email-if-anything-is-wrong — the most dangerous sentence in document automation, because it turns your carefully structured request into an unstructured message you then have to decode by hand.
Form Invitations are the answer to the second half of the problem.
What they are, in plain terms
You send a secure link to any recipient. They click it. A form opens in their browser — no login, no account, no app to download. They fill it in, confirm it, or sign it, depending on what you asked them to do. They submit. Their response writes directly into your DataPublisher data set.
You see the status update in real time: Sent, Viewed, Draft, Submitted.
That's it. You did nothing except click Send.
No re-entry. No email thread to parse. No PDF to squint at. No follow-up unless the status tells you one is needed.
Three types of interaction. One workflow.
The wizard asks you one question before you send: what kind of interaction are you requesting?
Fill In is for when you don't have the data yet. The recipient sees a blank or partially-filled form and provides the information from scratch. New student registration. Client intake. Onboarding questionnaire. The response creates a new record in your data set.
Confirm is for when you already have the data but need the person it belongs to verify it. The form pre-fills from your existing record. They review it, approve what's correct, and fix what's changed. You get a precise update — not a full re-collection. No asking people to re-enter what they gave you last year. Just: here's what we have. Is it still right?
Sign is for when the document is finalized and you need a formal acknowledgment. The content is locked. The recipient reviews and signs. The signature and timestamp are stored against the record.
Three interactions. Each purpose-built. Each writing the right kind of data back into your system in the right way.
The one that will change your workflow most
Most people immediately understand Fill In and Sign. Confirm is the one that takes a moment to land — and then becomes the one you use most.
Think about school enrollment season. Every September, coordinators send out a packet: 40-field PDF, instructions to print and return, deadline nobody meets. Most of that information hasn't changed from last year. The child's name is still the same. The date of birth is still the same. The address is probably still the same. But you have to ask again, because you have no mechanism to do anything else.
With a Confirm form, you send last year's record, pre-filled. The parent opens it, changes the one phone number that changed, confirms the allergy that's still the same, clicks Submit. The record updates. The coordinator never touches a form.
That's not just more efficient. It's more respectful of everyone's time — yours and theirs.
You always know where every form stands
The Form Invitations dashboard shows every link you've sent with a live status:
Sent — delivered, not yet opened. Viewed — they opened it. Draft — they started and saved. Submitted — done, data in your set. Expired — link timed out. Revoked — you cancelled it.
If someone missed it, you resend in one click. If you sent to the wrong address, you revoke immediately — the link stops working the moment you click Revoke.
No more wondering. No more follow-up emails asking if they received it. The dashboard tells you exactly who needs a nudge and who is already done.
Built for data you're responsible for
Every invitation generates a unique token. The link contains only that token — no names, no email addresses, no field values in the URL. Expiry is enforced server-side. Sharing the link or modifying the URL doesn't extend it or transfer access. Submitted data goes into your private per-user schema, not shared with any other account.
It's single-use by design. One recipient. One form. One submission. The link stops working the moment it's used or revoked.
The loop is closed
Mail merge gave you the output. Form Invitations give you the input. For the first time, the document workflow runs in both directions — and everything that comes back is structured, typed, timestamped, and already in your data set.
No more chasing. No more re-entry. No more email threads to decode.
Open the Actions tab in DataPublisher for Word. Click Forms. Click Send. You'll have your first invitation out in under three minutes.
The document goes out. Now the data comes back.
DataPublisher for Word is available at datapublisher.io. Form Invitations are included in all plans.