Next-generation e-forms

The transition from paper to electronic forms seems like a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want to abolish the anachronism of paper forms in capturing and relaying business-critical information? Of course, centuries of bureaucracy yield habits that are hard to break. In December, for example, the federal government ignored a $17 million grant application from New Hampshire because, according to a state official, “some pages had margins narrower than one inch.”

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E-forms can’t do anything about boneheaded business rules. But they provide a more accurate, intuitive replacement for paper forms than plain HTML forms or antiseptic data entry screens — and in the latest e-forms software, they wrap captured data in XML format. These products also provide design tools that allow you to build attractive XML-enabled forms quickly and easily.

Microsoft’s XML-oriented InfoPath, which shipped with Office 2003 in October, is now deployed and in use. Adobe plans to ship a beta version of its PDF- and XML-oriented forms designer in the first quarter of this year. And e-forms veterans such as PureEdge and Cardiff, whose offerings are built on an XML core, are lining up behind XForms, an e-forms specification that became an official W3C recommendation in October 2003.

The XML Denominator

Common to all these vendors’ approaches is the use of XML as the bridge between applications that gather data from end-users and the back-office systems that absorb that data. Three factors contribute to the unanimous choice of XML:

Universal data exchange  Web services are only the tip of the XML iceberg. InfoPath, for example, can talk to SOAP end points, but it can also post raw XML data to an ordinary Web server or send it as e-mail. In general, if you want to move a package of structured information from point A to point B, you’d be crazy not to leverage the XML machinery that’s freely available and widely deployed on all platforms.

Declarative validation  Enterprise applications depend on clean data; you’ve got to scrub it before it enters your systems. There’s no avoiding the use of procedural code for scrubbing, but the more validation you can handle declaratively, the better. All the emerging solutions rely on W3C XML Schema for that purpose. Support for XML Schema in e-forms software is a watershed event.

Document orientation  Forms can present flat lists of name/value pairs, hierarchical and irregularly shaped structures, or — typically — a combination of these styles. XML’s roots in publishing make it a good fit for modeling the documentlike qualities of forms as well as their databaselike qualities.

The Paper Legacy

Within this broad XML consensus, there are differences that reflect the legacies of Microsoft, Adobe, the e-forms vendors, and the customers they serve (see “E-forms Line-by-Line,” page 54). The relationship of e-forms solutions to printed forms, and to the processes that surround them, is a major source of differentiation. For all their inefficiency as data-gathering instruments, printed forms are highly engineered information displays. People who scan and process forms often rely on their layout and typography, which is why some industries — insurance, for example — standardize the look and feel of forms as well as their content.

Yet even a pixel-perfect rendering of a form on a screen can’t replace the printed original. You can’t arrange piles of Tablet PCs on your desk the way you can arrange piles of paper. In a 2002 New Yorker article entitled “The Social Life of Paper”, Malcolm Gladwell argued convincingly that the paperless office has failed to materialize for the very good reason that piles of paper are not simply messes but rather critical mechanisms for thinking and planning.

Printed forms have many other uses. Although all the e-forms solutions support digital signatures, few users have acquired the digital certificates they need to sign forms. So we’ll be signing printed documents for many years to come. And we’ll be archiving them, too: Paper’s proven longevity far exceeds that of any digital medium.

Adobe vs. Microsoft

For all these reasons, Adobe’s forthcoming solution is certain to attract attention. It builds on a capability that Adobe has quietly embedded into the free Acrobat Reader. Version 6 of that product can display a form backed by XML data that is governed by any XML Schema definition. According to Adobe Senior Product Manager Chuck Myers, no licensed extensions are required in order to interact with that data and post it back to a Web server or to transmit it by e-mail. An enterprise that needs its users to save forms locally for offline use and to digitally sign, annotate, or connect them to Web services end points will be able to unlock these capabilities using Adobe’s Document Server for Reader Extensions.

Given this infrastructure, all Adobe needs to compete head-to-head with Microsoft’s InfoPath is an XML-aware forms designer. And that’s just what the company demonstrated at XML 2003 in December. The Adobe Forms Designer supports two approaches to creating forms. As with InfoPath, you can start with a blank canvas plus a schema, paint the canvas with user-interface widgets, and then bind schema elements to those widgets by dragging and dropping. Or you can start with an existing PDF form and bind schema elements to regions of the form. Wizards that guide users through complex data-entry chores and implement procedural validation can be added as scripted extensions.