New Article on eForms in the Seybold Report
April 28, 2004
I have a new article on eForms in the Seybold Report, “Suddenly, E-Forms Matter.” To quote briefly from the introduction:
“Electronic forms have long resided in a sleepy corner of the content-management landscape, perched somewhere between scan-and-capture applications and records management. Indeed, only recently have content-management vendors and analysts broadened the definition of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to include the comparatively fixed content assets in applications such as records management and forms processing. As a result, the feature set and functionality of electronic forms have never been high on end users’ lists for content-management solutions.
This lack of interest has not been from a lack of work, however. Electronic forms are ubiquitous on the Internet-think e-commerce applications, site registration and search forms. Indeed, HTML forms are the de facto standard for interfacing people and processes on the Web, and Internet and intranet applications are replete with HTML forms for both user and administrative interfaces.
Moreover, content-management applications especially have relied on HTML forms interfaces. Many Web applications, for example, depend heavily on storing content in relational database tables. HTML forms are a direct and ready means of developing an interface for such tables, so developers have relied on them.
But just as people eventually realized that HTML was not a robust markup language that could glue applications together-leading to XML-so too have people realized that HTML forms are not the best method for collecting and validating data and content.”
Posted by Bill Trippe at April 28, 2004 8:55 PM
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Great article.
Posted by CD at May 12, 2004 7:15 AMMany organisations used the basic eForms capabilities of Lotus Notes over the past 10 years...very successfully and quite cheaply!