IBM Debuts Workplace Forms: pensate ad Infopath e vedrete da soli la differenza ;-)

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by Demir Barlas and Tamina Vahidy, Line56
https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?articleID=7116&TopicID=4

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

IBM has released IBM Workplace Forms, a solution that has three components: a viewer ($188 per user), a designer ($649 per user), and a server ($25,000 per CPU). The technology comes from PureEdge, a company that IBM acquired in June of this year.

IBM plans to sell the forms to organizations in government, insurance, financial services, healthcare, and in other industries in which end users need to fill out structured information

The advantage of a form lies in its intelligence. For example, if the form is customized for insurance, an end user who marks himself "male" on the form will prompt the rest of the form to adjust itself around that designation. A financial services form could do the same kind of adjustment around a certain income level.

Dirk Nicholls, program director for IBM Workplace Forms, says that the U.S. government is a big customer of the new product, with the Army and Navy in particular signing on. "There are lots of forms and processes," he says, "and lots of regulation and security required." The forms address each of these concerns.

IBM Workplace Forms are standards-based and come with a set of APIs, so companies can integrate them into different back-end components. Coming up next year is a plan to integrate Workplace Forms with IBM's middleware, portal, content management, and other products so that it fights into an IBM portfolio out of the box.