# Let people outside Content Central submit a capture form

Enable Content Central's no-login submission path — an e-mailed capture-form PDF whose Submit button posts straight back to your server — and know exactly what an outside submitter can and cannot see.

Product: content-central · Versions: 7.x · Audience: catalog-administrator · Time: About 20 minutes · Last verified: 2026-08-31

Canonical: https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/share-a-capture-form-outside-content-central

**By the end of this guide, people with no Content Central account — vendors, citizens, applicants — can fill out and submit a capture form you e-mail them, and you'll know exactly what they can and cannot see while doing it.**

The no-login path is e-mail-delivered, not a public web page. Content Central e-mails the capture-form PDF, and the copy it sends carries a **Submit** button wired to an expiring link back to your server. The recipient fills in the PDF and clicks **Submit** — no account, no login page, no access to Content Central itself.

> **IMPORTANT:** There is no public URL an outsider can open to fill out a blank form and create a new document. Every submission through this path is a new version of the form document you sent. If you need outsiders to send you brand-new documents, use the intake routes near the end of this guide.

## What an outside submitter can and cannot do

| An outside submitter can | They cannot |
| --- | --- |
| Fill in the PDF form you e-mailed them | Open any Content Central page or log in |
| Click **Submit** while the link is still valid | See any document list, search, or other data |
| See a plain success or failure message | Create a new document or choose a document type |
| Submit a revision of that one document | Reuse the link after it expires |

The submit link carries an unguessable, expiring session ID, and every submission is logged in the document's history with the submitter's IP address. Field values from the form change the document only when your settings and permissions allow it.

## Step 1: Turn on submissions for the form

1. In the web admin, open the document type's actions menu and choose **Capture Forms**, then open your form from the **Manage Capture Forms** page.

2. On the **Capture Form Details** page, check **Allow revisions from recipients of e-mails**.

3. For a static (non-dynamic) form, also enable **Allow revisions via submit button** — without it, the submit-ready PDF is never produced.

4. Set **Session Expiration:** — how long the e-mailed link stays valid. A new form defaults to `12` `Hours`; pick a window that matches how quickly your recipients respond.

5. Confirm the form itself is enabled — new capture forms start disabled — and save.

> **NOTE:** A **Flatten PDF after first submission** option on the same page locks the form after its first submitted revision — useful when exactly one response per document is the point.

*[Screenshot: **Session Expiration** sets how long a link stays valid; **Allow revisions from recipients of e-mails** is what lets someone open the same document again from their link and submit changes.]*

## Step 2: If workflow sends the e-mail, enable the global switch

1. Go to **System Settings > Workflow Settings** and turn on **Allow capture-form submissions from workflow-based e-mail recipients**.

Both this switch **and** the Step 1 checkbox must be on for a workflow e-mail to embed the submit link. Sending the document manually with the **Email** action needs only the per-form checkbox.

## Step 3: Send the form and what the recipient does

Send the capture-form document with a workflow e-mail action or the manual **Email** action, to any address — including addresses outside your organization. Content Central rewrites the attached PDF as it sends, so the recipient's copy carries the live submit link.

On the recipient's side:

1. They open the PDF attachment — Adobe Reader or a mainstream browser's built-in PDF viewer; test with the viewer your audience actually uses.

2. They fill in the fields. Depending on the viewer, an alert names the first empty required field before the form will submit.

3. They click the form's **Submit** button.
   
   **What they should see:** `Your form was submitted successfully.` A `Submit Failure` message most often means the link expired — re-send the form to issue a fresh one.

> **NOTE:** Expired sessions are deleted before an upload is processed, so a late submission fails cleanly instead of landing somewhere. A form is also not re-issued once a signed revision of the document exists.

## Where the submission lands and who finds out

The submission arrives as a **new major version of the same document you e-mailed**, and the document's history records the action with the submitter's IP address. Field values from the form update the document when **Always allow capture-form field changes** is on in System Settings, or when the acting user behind the session has metadata-edit permission on the document type — approval-process field restrictions still apply.

Nobody is alerted automatically. To notify staff, build a workflow rule on the events the submission fires: the rule editor offers a trigger that fires when a new revision is uploaded to a document, and another that fires when a field value changes. Give the rule an e-mail or internal-message action using a Message Template — recipients can be typed external addresses, specific users or groups, or role-based targets such as the document type's administrators.

## Test it the way a real submitter will

1. E-mail the form to a personal address, open it on a device that has never logged in to Content Central, fill it in, and click **Submit**.
   
   **What you should see:** `Your form was submitted successfully.`

2. Back in Content Central, confirm the document gained a new version, its fields updated as expected, and your notification rule fired.

3. Repeat the test from outside your network — a phone on cellular data works — because that's where your real recipients will be.

> **IMPORTANT:** Whether outsiders can reach your server at all depends on your network — public DNS, firewall rules, and HTTPS. If a submission succeeds inside your network but fails outside it with a still-valid link, that's a networking task for your IT team, not a Content Central setting.

## Need outsiders to create new documents instead?

The e-mailed form only revises the document you sent. For brand-new documents from outside, Content Central has two intake routes, both configured in the Catalog Manager desktop application on the catalog's **Capture Jobs** tab:

- **Email capture** — a capture job monitors a mailbox and converts attached files into documents; e-mail details like sender and subject can map to document fields. Treat it as attachment intake, not form parsing.
- **Folder capture** — a capture job watches an **Incoming Folder** and imports files dropped there, such as a shared or synced drop folder.

Documents arriving without complete metadata land in the Coding Queue for a licensed user to finish. Workflow triggers for newly captured documents and for Coding Queue arrivals give you the same notification options for these routes. If your project truly needs a public, browsable web form that creates new documents, ask Ademero support about current options — it isn't part of the e-mailed-form feature.

## Still stuck?

Send support this compact evidence set — nothing more is needed to start:

- [ ] A screenshot of the form's **Capture Form Details** page showing the allow-revisions options and **Session Expiration:**
- [ ] Whether the e-mail came from a workflow action or the manual **Email** action, and the state of the **Workflow Settings** switch
- [ ] Whether your own test submission succeeded from inside your network, from outside it, or neither
- [ ] One concrete example: recipient address, date/time sent, date/time they clicked **Submit**, the PDF viewer they used, and the exact message they saw

## What's next

- [Create a capture form](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/create-a-capture-form)
- [Capture documents sent to e-mail](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/capture/capture-documents-sent-to-email)