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

LifeCycle

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.

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