These days, increasing number of enterprises are using e-forms to perform many important tasks and achieve results. These forms can include simple forms where users are required to leave their email address and a message to multi-page complex forms that include calculations and logic. Though most of the e-forms are designed in HTML along with JavaScript, many other technologies such as Adobe LiveCycle forms are becoming popular.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is a desktop tool that allows you to create and deploy the dynamic and interactive forms based upon XML forms. This Adobe designer is a WSIWYG tool where you are just required to drag and drop the fields onto the form. This tool also provides features to bind form fields into data sources including web services, XML Schema, and ODBC data providers. It helps the developers to integrate the visual designing process to integrate smoothly with existing data infrastructures and enterprise technologies.

After the template is ready, Adobe LiveCycle Forms can create output form as HTML and PDF like a PDF form designer.  In addition, you can merge the existing enterprise data and data from other applications before presenting it to the users. Besides its capabilities of form creation and data merging, it offers various other features such as data extraction from submitted PDF. Moreover, it also allows server side processing for data.

There are many advantages of Adobe LiveCycle forms. They can capture data in the most useful way from the internal as well as external users. It can deliver to any browser, remove delay if manual processing and routing, reduces the expensive costs of gathering paper-based information. In addition, it improves the data consistency and accuracy by reducing the possible human errors. It can integrate with existing enterprise applications and data infrastructure. The most important thing is you need not touch even a single desktop for deploying forms in the entire enterprise.

LiveCycle forms can be used in various daily life applications such as travel request and approval, application for services and benefits, and expense management. More such applications include loan applications that communicate with back end systems, customized solutions for online insurance, and survey portals for your audience and more.

In the LiveCycle form designer, the form is viewed to comprised of three sections; the graphical layout of the form, the form scripts and a hierarchical structure of logical form elements. While form layout is created by drag and drop, the elements are selected from a  library in the Designer which contains all the elements and fields normally found on the forms  such as text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes and drop-down lists, and selection of graphical and structural elements like lines, curves, image fields and tables. You can create dynamic forms by using JavaScript for the form elements.

Adobe LiveCycle forms is the excellent applications introduced by Adobe under its ES2 module. While searching for a reliable, cost-effective and secure application to extend our core business processes, I found this application very suitable to our enterprise’s requirements. Once I started exploring this option, I become fond of it. I can use it as PDF form designer or can create and deploy XML-based templates as HTML forms or as Flash guided experience. If you are interested in such an excellent application, read more.

The Adobe LiveCycle forms applications can be easily accessed using Adobe Reader® or Flash® Player software or web browsers. You can use to capture data and integrate it directly into the back-end systems of your organization and streamlining format-driven business processes. In addition, it also help s improves the data accuracy.

Let me count a few important capabilities of this LiveCycle forms designer. It can create and deploy form templates immediately without any hassles. Moreover, it can process form templates. This Adobe application offers an enhanced used experience with its dynamic forms and guides.  In addition, it can integrate with many LiveCycle modules.

Along with Adobe LiveCycle Forms ES2 comes the Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES2 or the PDF form designer. It has the graphical design features that can design and organize forms which can be used to create the exact look and feel that is seen in paper-based forms.

These forms have several components that make it easy for the designers to integrate all the elements required in a real life form. These components include fields, objects, and scripts packaged and all these can be packaged together to make a reusable component such as address block or financial information sections. Using prebuilt form fragments or the collection of the components make it easy to quickly create new forms. In addition, it automatically changes in the forms that affect the global fragments. Another advantage of using this application is you can combine many PDF forms into a single PDF form packages to make it easy for the users to quickly access the required forms for their transactions.

These days, most enterprises are making use of e-forms for all purposes. By providing e-forms with improved user experience, they can exact faster response time and lower exit rate. The LiveCycle forms can provide more enhanced user experience to the end users which keep them stay on the page. Deploying the e-forms designed with Forms ES2 can make it more convenient for the users than traditional forms.  In addition, you can provide better user experience by deploying the wizard-like guides to help the user through the process of data capture. Designers can design high level guided experiences with the help of an intuitive WYSIWYG guide builder that uses a common data model. It helps them reducing the length of code and simply the data integration.

Continue reading “Know about the Capabilities of Adobe LiveCycle forms” »