eForms for the enterprise

Business challenges

Information is everywhere

In today's global economy, information is everywhere and successful businesses need to be able to capture and interact with pertinent data. Sometimes the information can be found inside your organization within the security of your enterprise firewall. But more often than not, the data you're looking for resides outside your organization with your customers, prospects, suppliers, constituents, and partners.

The challenge with capturing information outside your organization is that the data resides in environments that you may not have control of. From different devices and platforms to working offline and on paper, these are the mediums in which your customers, prospects, suppliers, constituents, and partners operate in, and you cannot control or change them. Additional challenges include:

Capture, management, and delivery of information from disparate data sources
Abandonment or lack or adoption of automated processes
Deployment and training for unknown and uncontrollable clients and environments
Compliance, document of record, and archiving of electronic transactions

Data security

Data security is a critical component for the exchange of information outside your protected business systems and organizational firewall regardless of your industry groups. From financial services to government agencies to manufacturing and life sciences, enterprises need absolute assurance that sensitive information will not be compromised, whether unintentionally or maliciously.

Industry regulations, compliance, and legislative mandates like Graham Leach-Bliley, Basel II, and HIPAA have added technological variables to providing online security and privacy. Specific concerns in this area include:

Highlights

VHA discovers cure for paper headaches

Learn how VHA improved productivity through electronic form processes with numerous legislative regulations.

Electronic Order of Protection Process

Kane County automates the Order of Protection Process to reduce a victim's time spent in the court process while maintaining the integrity of court documents.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, improves the speed and quality of patient care with help from Adobe LiveCycle Forms solutions.

2006 TAWPI Report (PDF, 544k)

Read the 2006 TAWPI report and analysis of form processing, data capture and document capture systems, operations, and trends.

"As much as 85 percent of business processes depend on forms, and electronic counterparts (eForms) can yield significant cost savings over paper in design, development, production, inventory, delivery data quality, and integration, as well as reduce the time and effort associated with paper-intensive processes."
—Gartner, May 2006

Protecting customer information (government ID numbers, financial information, credit numbers, and so on) in online and offline transactions
Creating documents of record for transactions
Ability to support and integrate digital signature and security technologies
Encryption of data

What to look for in an eForms solution

When deploying a new electronic forms solution, certain capabilities should be considered. Your current forms environment may be complex — with forms existing on paper, electronically, or a combination of both — and the transition from your current environment to a more automated, electronic one may backfire if the general user community is not willing to adopt your new methodologies. Key considerations to ensure a smooth transition include:

The ability to deploy a single solution that addresses form and data security inside and outside the organizational firewall
The ability for all users (internal, external, online, and offline) to leverage existing universal tools and clients for form completion and participation, to:
     1. Accelerate project deployment and implementation time frames
     2. Reduce maintenance and support issues for IT
     3. Minimize user learning curves
The ability to easily convert and transition existing form formats into an electronic and highly intelligent eForms format that can be extended online, offline, and on paper
The ability to accommodate industry- or government-regulated forms that maintain their fidelity electronically
The ability to protect, encrypt, and digitally sign eForms that extend outside core business systems and firewalls

Why Adobe

Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite data capture solutions leverage the pervasiveness and platform independence of universal clients like standard web browsers and free Adobe Reader® software to deliver highly intelligent, interactive forms. With more than 600 million licenses of Adobe Reader worldwide, LiveCycle ES provides a complete solution for the enterprise workplace to extend electronic forms beyond the boundaries of traditional eForm technologies that are limited by reach, platform support, and security.

Key values of Adobe LiveCycle ES for eForms

Provides the pervasiveness and platform independence of Adobe Reader
Extends business processes outside the firewall, offline, and onto paper
Integrates smoothly with other systems through XML
Provides rich, engaging, and interactive forms that can be rendered in PDF or HTML
Brings the familiarity of paper to the electronic environment with PDF
Helps organizations meet compliance regulations and industry standards, including ACORD, MISMO, PDF/A, Section 508, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and others
Protects sensitive information by providing confidentiality, privacy, authentication, integrity, nonrepudiation, and availability

Readers' Choice award

Adobe wins Readers' Choice award for Best Data and Document Capture Software from Intelligent Enterprise

Readers named Adobe as their preferred vendor in two separate software categories.

Download now

Forrester discusses key considerations when looking at eForm solutions
Learn how eForms complement ECM Register to view the recorded event.

Adobe LiveCycle ES eForm solution components

"Adobe is the hands-down leader when it comes to distributing forms to end users. All the products evaluated can broadcast forms via browsers — that capability is no longer a differentiator. However, there are times when a browser simply cannot do what a rich client can, such as enable offline forms filling. The ubiquity (and free price point) of...Reader means that virtually all possible end users already have an Adobe rich client on their machines."
—Barry Murphy, The Forrester Wave
June 2006

PDF and XML

The power of PDF and XML

Adobe PDF is the de facto standard for the reliable and more secure distribution of electronic documents and forms around the world. It is a universal file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. As a published file format specification, PDF is available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents. Consumers as well as businesses and governments benefit from the ubiquity of PDF because free Adobe Reader software lets them view content-rich PDF files.

Adobe LiveCycle eForm solutions combine PDF and XML standards to capture information to integrate with existing enterprise infrastructures. The LiveCycle eForm solutions make it possible to link arbitrary XML schemas to forms. The form data can be easily exported, according to the schema, as an XML file, via web services using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), or directly into databases. The XML schemas for PDF forms can be industry-standard vertical vocabularies (such as ACORD and HL7) or custom schemas developed internally.

With this support, you can produce solutions for enterprises (including financial, insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing), government agencies, and publishing businesses that:

Produce intelligent XML-based PDF files that automatically initiate or more effectively support business processes
Design more intelligent forms with embedded business logic that facilitate business process automation
Maintain the appearance and integrity of PDF files using digital signatures, automatic archiving, and more
Output tagged Adobe PDF files that automatically reflow for different display devices and that enable accessibility for users with visual and other impairments
Can be archived for record retention, fraud prevention, and audit trails