I have been busy this past week preparing a series of posts regarding our ideas with respect to the next generation of FormsAssistant.

One thing has lead to another, and, at the end the quick and dirty PowerPoint presentation that I used, in an effort to organize logically my ideas, has grown into a complete 8 page document that I have pompously named "Introduction to FormsAssistant v2 -Preliminary specification and description". The cover of the document is shown below:

This document is available for download. (It’s a 1.4 Mb PDF)

My intention is to maintain the document in sync with the development process and use it to explain the new features of the new version to current users and as a promotional tool when the new version is finally released.

My previous experience with Control Runner of publishing on the blog the plans for the future release of an application has been very satisfactory. For that reason, I plan to do the same with FormsAssistant on a series of posts, starting with this one.

As an aside note: Control Runner 4 is going well and the final beta version will be released real soon now (believe me, this is not a joke).

The life-cycle of forms

FormsAssistant v1 is just a convenient way to fill in forms made with Microsoft Word. That was its original intention, and that was what it did. When I designed it, I had in mind a single concern: stop retyping the same information on multiple documents, and rather fetch them from a recently used clips database.

That is good and useful, but it only covers a very limited part of what I have come to call the "Life cycle of forms".

See below a graphical representation of what I believe represents the life of a business form used on any organization

Figure - The life-cycle of forms

In other words, a form:

• Is created, either by the same user that will later use it, or more frequently by the department responsible of setting up corporate procedures.
• Some parts of the form have to be "marked up" as variable information ("fields") that will later filled in by the user.
• The form has to be distributed to made it available for users to access it when needed.
• From time to time, forms have to be modified as the needs may change.
• Users of the form have to fill in the form: fields are replaced with the appropriate information in each use of the form.

FormsAssistant v1 basically relied on Word to create, mark-up and modify forms and on users to archive and distribute forms. It was, in short, a form filling software.

FormsAssistant v2 will still be based on Word (using Word documents) but it will assist in all aspects of the form Life-cycle.

On the next posts I will show you how.