Next-generation e-forms

Paper will never die. Instead, it’s going digital and providing a better, XML-enabled way to enter critical data

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.

Because Adobe’s solution leverages features that already exist in the free and widely deployed Acrobat Reader, its reach will exceed that of InfoPath, a product that is available only for Windows and is bundled only with the enterprise edition of Office 2003.

Adobe’s PDF-oriented solution also trumps Microsoft’s in terms of its fidelity to printed forms — but a form’s appearance and its capability of capturing data are really two issues that need to be teased apart. A printed form is often the best solution for reviewing, signing, and archiving, but the digital-paper version of that form, onscreen, is not clearly the best solution for interactive data-gathering. Users of tax preparation programs such as Intuit’s TurboTax or H&R Block’s TaxCut, for example, want to be able to print pixel-perfect tax forms. But few would prefer to interact with literal representations of those forms. We value the dynamic, spreadsheet-like, wizard-assisted experience that the tax programs provide.