The Buzz Around Electronic Forms
by Penny Lunt
e-forms Product Guide (PDF, 37K)
printable version (PDF, 35K)
The electronic forms software market has drawn publicity this year with the introduction of Microsoft InfoPath and new offerings from Adobe. FileNet's spring acquisition of Shana added yet another big-league endorsement for e-forms.
"The entry of larger companies into this space has increased awareness and interest in e-forms," notes Steve Myerow, president of Texcel Systems, Wayland, MA.
Other trends in the e-forms space include an embrace of XML and Web services and stronger ties to business processes.
The rise of XML. We've been writing about the usefulness and versatility of extensible markup language for years, but only in the past year or so has it become commonplace among electronic forms products.
"Customers are increasingly using XML as a standard way to represent data in a vendor-agnostic way," says Rajesh Jha, general manager of InfoPath at Microsoft, Redmond, WA.
Industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals and insurance are defining their own standard schemas. Other companies have pre-defined data structures in their legacy databases. All need form tools that will not only support customer-defined and industry schemas but also provide forms that are flexible and easy to use.
Adoption of Web services. Across the board, companies are shifting to Web services as a means to communicate with their organizational databases, Jha says. "New-generation forms tools need to have native support for XML Web services so that developers don't have to spend costly cycles hooking up forms packages to their back ends," he maintains.
Increasing use of PDF. Companies that need printable e-forms with a consistent look and feel continue to use the portable document format. Sydney Sloan, group product marketing manager for Adobe, San Jose, CA, notes that as companies migrate from traditional client-server technologies to more universally available Web technologies, "the interactive capabilities of PDF can help to extend data capture processes to internal and external users more efficiently via freely available clients, such as Web browsers and Adobe Reader."
While Sloan notes that universal clients may not be able to provide all the advanced features available in the previous client-based technologies, the advancement of XML data standards (such as ebXML) will allow thin-client electronic forms to play a significant role in capturing, handling and managing data that resides outside of the organization's core systems.
E-forms acting as the front end to business processes. This trend started with business process software using HTML forms, says David Clark, director of product marketing at PureEdge, Victoria, British Columbia. "The limitations of HTML — poor security, a single-server architecture that's either inside or outside the firewall, reliance on custom JavaScript to create such basic forms features as input type-checking and formatting — are causing the market to look for more specialized software. As customers get more ambitious with their e-forms projects, using them to front-end core processes, they're demanding features e-forms software provides: security, flexibility, intelligence and integration capabilities."
E-forms handling simple business processes. Jim Fleming, editorial director at AnyDoc (formerly Microsystems Technology), Tampa, FL, takes this idea a bit further and suggests that entire processes can be built with sophisticated e-forms software. "E-forms can be created for groups like human resources with built-in approvals, workflow routing and high-level security, and can be modified for industry- or organization-specific needs."
What will become of e-forms as applications such as business process management, portal and office applications provide e-forms interfaces of their own? Not surprisingly, vendors assert there will always be a need for separate e-forms systems.
"The software package that allows you to streamline the information gathering process should be optimized for this task," says Microsoft's Jha. "Then developers can avoid having to write custom applications each with their own UI, and thus avoid user retraining and having to code the custom business logic for each of these gathering scenarios."
Clark at PureEdge notes that most BPM- and portal-based e-forms are built with HTML; therefore, they're restricted to basic data capture.
According to Dan Shirra, vice president of worldwide marketing at Cardiff, Vista, CA, specialized e-forms systems will always have an edge. "As other applications begin rolling out e-form interfaces, those solutions will either have been acquired ... or developed in house as an add-on feature," he says. "Either way, [they're likely to be] yet another extra in a huge software suite that many enterprises won't use. The companies that need e-form management software solutions will look to established vendors who specialize in the area and will provide them with flexible solutions that will integrate with their legacy applications."
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