When I look at Forms products I see a huge return on investment especially if it can be paired with an easy to use workflow tool. Just as the market continues to evolve, IBM continues to work on their Forms tools.
What’s New
- IBM renamed it to IBM Forms. It is now the Forms tool of choice across all of IBM. If you are a FileNet customer, IBM Forms is the tool. If you buy WebSphere Process Server and want a front end for human interactions, IBM Forms is the tools
- First and foremost, the tool supports all the latest rich internet tooling so you can use the Forms Designer to create a rich form with light boxes, type aheads, sections that open up as you choose them etc. The demo was pretty nice.
- Lower TCO with 64 Bit computing support. You gotta love scalability.
- Lower TCO with reusable components. Create a section of a form in one place and re-use it in another form. Change that component and see it changed everywhere. He created an address block as a component and just dragged all that info pre-formatted onto the form and voila, it was there.
- Interactive Experiences. Marty showed a demo of asking where you live, popping up a map and then pushing that data back into the form.
- Support for other platforms. They support the ipad with an app. They support Android, Blackberry, and iPhone with a web app sized to the form factor of the phone.
Workflow Server
I’m a huge believer that no matter how spiffy the form and how good a job it does in pre-populating data and making it easy to fill out; once it’s complete, you want to do something with it. HR needs to sign off on it, IT needs to create an ID, a business person needs to fulfill an order, etc. So while IBM has other “big” products to fulfill this need.
The workflow supports linear, branch and merge and even smart workflows. By smart I mean thing like: submit a vacation request, workflow looks up your boss and assigns the next task to him or her. Your boss approves the request and then pushes the data to a db or to a system using a web service.
In addition, the workflow server comes with a reporting service and designer to help you track what’s happening. You now have an audit trail. You can figure out who is productive and who isn’t. The report designer is very point and click oriented so a savvy business user could create reports with the tool.
Back End Integration
- From the designer, it pulls in data from a web service and creates all the fields from the service onto the form automatically. If you have 40 fields, that’s a huge time savings when creating the form.
- The workflow designer lets you hook up to databases or web services pretty easily so it makes it simple to push data to back end systems once you are done interacting with it.
- The workflow is really well integrated with the form itself and fully supports the xform standard
