Following through on Adobe System’s move to
shift to an XML architecture, the company Tuesday unwrapped its plans to
storm the nascent market for XML form creation with new form design
software that will allow users to deploy forms in Adobe’s Portable Document
Format (PDF) or in an XML Data Package (XDP) as desired.
The new software, which Adobe plans to combine with its server solutions,
is intended to provide tools that will make forms more flexible and
efficient for industries like financial services and manufacturing, as well
as public sector organizations.
Like InfoPath, a similar technology from Microsoft which is expected to hit
the market ahead of Adobe’s effort, the company said the new software will
support organizations with the ability to define business logic and
incorporate both existing and user-defined schemas. User-defined schemas
allow organizations to create XML vocabularies specific to the needs of
their verticals, or to adhere to cross-industry standards.
The software will allow users to deploy forms in PDF. They can then be
processed as PDF files, as is the current norm, or be delivered as an XDP
which can be processed as XML. Adobe noted that because XDPs consist of XML
files that contain XML form data, XML form templates, PDF documents and
other XML information, they can easily be integrated with enterprise
applications through XML tools and Web services.
“Thanks to XML, the distinction between enterprise documents and enterprise
forms has irreversibly blurred,” said Tim Hickernell, vice president of
META Group. “By leveraging the power of XML to build more intelligent
documents, companies are now challenged to design enterprise forms that are
flexible enough to allow maximum reuse of corporate data across enterprise
systems, as well as across traditional enterprise documents.”
By allowing PDFs to be processed as XML, Adobe hopes to streamline
organizations’ internal operations. For instance, a financial institution
can use the technology to make loan applications available online. Anyone
with a free Acrobat Reader can download the form, fill it in, and submit
the form electronically to the institution. The file can then be integrated
directly into the institution’s existing loan processing system.
“Until now, organizations have been struggling with integrating data and
documents into business processes to effectively and efficiently manage
information flow,” said Ivan Koon, senior vice president of the ePaper
Business Unit at Adobe. “The new form design software will give our
customers the power and flexibility to create sophisticated, intelligent
forms that capture business critical information for enterprise systems,
while ensuring that the information can be shared or reused in business
processes inside and outside the firewall.”
Adobe said the form designer will be combined with the Adobe Form Server,
Adobe Workflow Server, Adobe Document Server and the free Adobe Reader to
create an infrastructure for integrating enterprise applications and
document workflows throughout an organization. The company plans to make
its form designer available for beta testing during the fourth quarter of
2003.
Meanwhile, Adobe isn’t the only one working to integrate PDF and XML. The
open source OpenOffice.org Project, which is developing an office
productivity suite to compete with Microsoft’s Office, has issued
OpenOffice.org 1.1 Release Candidate 1, which signifies the 1.1 version of
the suite is close to final release. As previously
reported by internetnews.com, OpenOffice.org 1.1 features the
ability to export the suite’s native XML documents as PDF. The RC1 version
enhances both the suite’s PDF export support and support for mailing a
document as PDF. It also supports export to Macromedia Flash, DocBook, and
PDA file formats.
In addition it adds the ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x
single user installations, integrated Bitstream Vera fonts, support for
Microsoft Excel 95 and older form controls, built-in proofing tools and
hyphenation for a number of languages, and better Microsoft Office filters.
RC1 comes two months after the beta
2 release.
