Early XForms backers include PureEdge Solutions, which created and published one of the first XML-based forms specifications, XDFL. PureEdge chief executive Mark Upson expects XForms will help the e-forms industry standardise, as the format matures.
"We think it'll be an important standard moving forward, but they haven't really taken it to the level where it needs to be," Upson said. "It will probably be in XForms 1.1 or 1.2 where it has all the functionality companies expect."
Upson said that as more companies experiment with e-forms projects, they'll come to insist on straight-up XML, without proprietary document formats or data approaches.
"A lot of the hard work with Microsoft and especially Adobe solutions is going to be just feeding a database," Upson said. "Customers are not going to put up with large integration projects much longer. They want vendors who are going to deliver business value quickly and enable them to accomplish specific business tasks on top of their existing infrastructure."
Early e-forms adopters have included government agencies. The US Air Force recently switched 18,000 online documents from an early proprietary system to an XML-based package from PureEdge. Carolyn Watkins-Taylor, director of the Air Force's Departmental Publishing Office, said an XML-based approach was critical to allow data submitted via forms to circulate among the disparate government computing systems.
"It's very important to have something that can interact with legacy systems," Watkins-Taylor said.
Such government agencies are emblematic of the organisations with massive paper-based forms processes that have already embraced the concept of e-forms. Further adoption will take time, Schmelzer said.
"I can't say we've heard e-forms being a top priority for anyone," Schmelzer said. The (return on investment) is there for a company that spends a lot of time processing forms -- think of something like an insurance company handling claims -- but most organisations aren't like that."
IDC's Duhl agreed. "There are bigger challenges competing for attention now," he said. "It's not like Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, where IT departments are really under pressure now."
Duhl expects enterprise software sellers such as SAP to play a major role in promoting e-forms projects, as they provide a friendlier interface for consuming back-end data, which is likely to spur greater consumption of back-end resources.
"SAP is very interested in this area, letting you go from the SAP infrastructure out to a form and back again," Duhl said. "You don't have to use the SAP front end anymore; you can use a nice (user interface) you've built for your work flow."
