Will Kelly

I’ve had some experience creating forms in the past and watched forms creation move to tools like InfoPath and eventually onto the web. But one thing that still managed to bother me was that forms creation was still the realm of the individual contributor: “the forms guy”.  Now, it looks like with the latest updates to Forms Central that Adobe is making forms development into a collaborative versus an individual experience.

Now with Adobe Forms Central, users creating forms have some useful sharing and collaboration options that help set it apart from other forms creation tools. Clicking Share in the lower left hand corner of the screen brings up a menu of options including:

• Move it to a shared workspace
• Distribute form
• Add Collaborators
• Publish Responses

Shared Workspaces

Adobe FormsCentral resides on the Adobe’s Acrobat.com platform, an online productivity and collaboration tools suite. Choosing Move it to a shared workspace enables forms creators to bring in collaborators through an Acrobat.com workspace to review or assist with forms development. In forms driven environments, adding online collaboration to a forms development process can mean productivity gains and broadening out forms authoring beyond just “the forms guy”.

Collaborators can login to Acrobat.com and enter the workspace where the form is shared and open it in FormsCentral and be able to edit or review the form online. While the collaboration feature is easy to use, it could benefit from some simple reviewing tools even just a notes tool so reviewers could leave their comments and or approval or the form online.

Forms Distribution

The Share button also includes an option for forms distribution. FormsCentral takes a flexible approach to forms distribution that I like and consider forms distribution options part of the platform’s collaboration features.

The traditional mode of distributing an online form through a web page is joined by options for emailing and copying a link to the form, and tweeting a link to the form through an organization’s Twitter account.  Customizable fields for the Closed Message and Confirmation Message are also available.  Since these distribution options don’t require a lick of programming or sysadmin work, it can give organizations using FormsCentral a look and feel to their forms that can rival much larger web presences.

Add Collaborators

Creating forms has traditionally been a solitary pursuit at least from my perspective. Being able to bring in additional collaborators can be a way for extending the fun but also to develop more powerful forms that are the best reflection of the audience and the organization’s needs.

Clicking Add Collaborators brings up a dialog box where you can enter the email addresses of those you want to share the form with and make them a Co-author, Contributor, or Reader.

 Publish Responses

You can publish forms data from FormsCentral  and distribute the data by copying the link to an email and sending it out that way or by embedding the data into an HTML page both through a simple cut and paste. FormsCentral also enables you to unpublish data as well if you want to cut access to it.

Collaboration And Forms Creation

I like the fact that the back end tools in the service are well thought out, easy to use, and offer collaboration because the elements can go a long way to helping organizations create and distribute better forms for customer communications and information gathering. If you are looking for a hosted forms application, I recommend checking out FormsCentral to see if it meets your requirements.

Have you tried out collaboration in FormsCentral?