I’ve been following all the news about email bans in offices and the state of cloud based productivity tools in general lately. While I am a proponent of social media tools inside the enterprise, nothing cuts it as good old-fashioned forms based workflow in some environments. When I previously wrote about Adobe FormsCentral, a forms creation tool, it was easy to see where it could sit as foundational tool inside a virtual team or to take forms based process out of the email inbox.
The latest round of Adobe FormsCentral updates further cements it as a leader in electronic forms and a tool to consider if you want to move your forms from email to something more cloud-based and usable.
File Attachments
Adobe FormsCentral now supports file attachments being sent along with its forms. This opens up a lot of options for forms like online job applications and not to mention a range of internal process forms that may require file attachments. This is a really well thought out update and for whatever reason, I cannot recall seeing in other hosted forms applications.
A File attachment option now appears in the Add Item section. When you click on File Attachment a field properties dialog box appears which offers some pretty sweet control options over the file attachments you allow in your forms including with a default of 20 MB, which should be plenty for the typical MS Office documents that accompany corporate workflows. Other options include allowing multiple files, limiting file formats (useful if you only want to accept PDFs or block certain file types due to security reasons), Required (restricts the form from advancing without a file attachment), include help text, and skip logic rules to show/hide the attachment(s) options depending how form respondents answer previous form questions.
Hyperlinking Support
The latest round of updates also include hyperlinking support to let form respondents navigate back to a website or to a specified information/help page even send an email to a contact address. You can find the Link option under the Insert menu
Field Validation Features
My personal pet peeve with online forms is field validation where some forms seem to let me add in too much data and others seem to not accommodate enough information. Now, Adobe FormsCentral includes new Field Validation features that enable you to set minimum and maximum values for form fields
Improved Submission Receipts
For business, security, and reasons of convenience there might be cases where you don’t want a form author’s name attached to a form. Adobe has made improvements to the Submission Receipts
Form authors now have the option to protect their anonymity by preventing replies from being sent back to them, as well as exclude or include empty fields in the submission receipt email.
Under Options, you now have the option to select Submission Receipts and select Don’t include (Use formscentral-noreply@acrobat.com) instead of the email address on your account.
Easy Data Collection Is Attractive
Whether you put online forms to use to shore up internal or customer facing processes, it is hard to deny that easy data collection is attractive. This latest round of updates drop in perfectly to a very well designed and user-friendly back end set of tools already in place that move Adobe FormsCentral up another notch in the online forms market.
Have you tried out Adobe FormsCentral yet?
About Will Kelly