DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 14)

n C F CONTENT & FORM & ow more than ever, the eForms space is coming into its own. With the emergence of the Big Three into the market, eForms is fast on its way to being successfully adopted by many transactional companies today. However, the shadow of the Big Three is forcing smaller forms developers to set themselves apart. a Taking On the Big 3 Where forms developers ﬁt in | By Ray H. Killam First, a little history as I see it. One of the early entrants into the desktop electronic forms software development ﬁeld was TyRego Technologies with a product called TyForm, a PC-based program I ﬁrst saw in 1986. It was very interesting but wasn’t particularly practical in a development environment. Within a couple of years, additional products came to market, including JetForm, F3 Pro Designer (Bloc Development Corp.) and Delrina FormFlow. By the mid 90s, I counted more than 30 companies seriously involved with electronic forms software development. In 1994, Microsoft introduced a forms designer product call Microsoft Forms that was a short-lived product. Meanwhile, Adobe Acrobat was becoming popular for adding ﬁelds on design ﬁles created in other products. PDF forms started showing up everywhere but only as POD and Fill-and-Print because users could not save these forms with just the free Acrobat Reader. And, as we had learned in the early days, users would not use eForms if they could not easily print or save their work locally. Another issue that hampered eForms growth was the marketing strategy to sell “ﬁller” software for the desktop. The idea was for eForms software developers to make money by selling seat licenses. This idea was resisted by IT departments and by end users; thus, eForms use never really caught on. However, even today, some companies charge fees based on number of forms or number of users. But the introduction of browsers and the subsequent development of iForms (Internet forms) have generally eliminated the demand for ﬁller software. It is relatively easy to develop HTML forms for use on the Internet, and, as a result, most forms today are some form of HTML using an open design style. Meanwhile, the electronic forms software development space experienced consolidation. JetForm acquired Delrina, changed their After approximately 25 years of existence, some might say the electronic forms industry has not progressed very far. It seems that most forms available on the public Internet are still Level 1 (Print-on-Demand or POD) or Level 2 (Fill-and-Print). There are a few Level 3 (Intelligent Electronic Forms (IEF)) and even fewer applications based on electronic forms (Level 4). Level 5 forms (enterprise-enabled forms with built-in workﬂow) are practically non-existent. Internal electronic forms applications are quite different and more advanced, yet even these “inside-the-ﬁrewall” forms have not yet reached their potential as envisioned by the early pioneers in electronic forms software development. It seems that adoption of more sophisticated electronic forms just hasn’t happened. For the most part, eForms development has been hampered by several factors (in my opinion), including a lack of involvement by the large software developers, poor marketing strategies, under-funded development companies, user resistance, slowly changing legal and regulatory environments, signature requirements and the complexity of electronically signing forms, lack of forms standards and turf battles between departments within large companies. The Big Three All that is beginning to change. In recent years, three companies have begun to dominate the eForms marketplace — Adobe Systems, Inc., Microsoft Corporation and IBM Corporation. Each is an interesting story, and, I suspect, none of these companies actually consider themselves to be a part of the forms management industry. Of course, several small companies also participate in this space, and the competitive arena is ever-changing. 14 document april.08 www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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