Lotus Forms

IBM® Lotus® Forms provide an easy-to-use, dynamic front-end to business process automation that helps organizations quickly integrate data with existing IT systems. With zero footprint, electronic forms (eForms), Lotus Forms helps organizations improve productivity, reduce operational costs and cut development time while extending business processes to customers via the Web. Lotus Forms is based on open standards including XForms to provide organizations across many industries with flexible, security-rich eForms that deliver scalable solutions to drive business value. Lotus Forms helps your organization to:

• Make it easy for customers to do business with you Lotus Forms simplifies the form completion process through guided wizards, detailed help text, and pre-populated data from a wide range of enterprise systems. Web 2.0 based eForms make it easy for customers and partners to access forms via web browser without downloading additional software, helping reduce the time and effort needed to complete forms.
• Accelerate global business transactions Lotus Forms helps deliver electronic forms to end-users around the globe - on their schedules, in their native language, and from virtually any client device - reducing or eliminating physical transport and helping improve response time. Easy-to-use eForms with advanced digital signature capabilities to enable multiple signatures on specific sections, pages, or entire forms reduce transaction times and help protect data.
• Drive down operational costs Lotus Forms makes forms instantly available to end users, reducing paper and physical storage costs while reducing errors and data reentry. As a user-friendly front-end to your business processes, Lotus Forms accelerates the integration of data with more than 40 enterprise systems, helping you to leverage your existing IT investments while cutting development time and lowering costs associated with download and maintenance of additional software.
• Integrate data with existing systems Lotus Forms is based on open standards including XForms technology that encapsulates form data and business rules in a single, open, structured, and transportable format -- making data instantly available and easier to integrate. It provides a dynamic user interface to business process and helps organizations to integrate data with a broad range of systems across the IBM product portfolio as well as with independent software vendors.
• Address compliance pressures eForms powered by Lotus Forms provide pixel precise representation of paper-based forms to assist organizations in achieving compliance with government and industry regulations. Security-rich features including capabilities to add multiple digital signatures that detect tampering help protect validity of business data and streamline form completion process.
• Improve employee efficiency Lotus Forms creates wizard-based, intelligent electronic forms with custom business rules that validate form input at the point of entry, reducing the need for duplicate data entry and rework due to errors. Easy integration with more than 40 enterprise systems reduces manual re-keying of data and simplifies the form completion process. In addition, the Lotus Forms Viewer enables remote or disconnected employees to access and complete forms to provide maximum productivity regardless of the environment.
• Cut development time and rapidly develop forms applications Lotus Forms provide zero-footprint, web 2.0 deployment of high performance eForms. The Forms Services Platform component of the Lotus Forms Server software provides a library of reusable integration components to speed development of service-oriented solutions. In addition, it accelerates integration with a wide variety of back-end systems including content management systems, portals, business applications and enterprise systems, by significantly reducing the amount of custom code required.
• Activate Service Oriented Architectures with XForms based forms Lotus Forms integrates directly with Web Services to create an ideal human interface to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) providing a streamlined, integrated system that makes it easier for customers to fill and process forms online. By serving as a front-end to a business process, Lotus Forms helps combine data and business logic to seamlessly flow through processes enabled by SOAs and contains the intelligence to adapt to services across multiple enterprises and domains.