A new feature allows data collection outside firewalls; the vendor weighs in on Acrobat 8's Reader new local-save form features.For most third-party PDF vendors, Adobe's announcement that Acrobat 8 Pro can enable forms workflows that—for the first time—allow users to fill out forms in Adobe Reader and save that data on their hard drives was pretty insignificant.
For FormRouter, however, it was a huge change. The ASP made a chunk of its living by enabling such "local save" for its customers—small-to-midsize businesses—through a special license of LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server, Adobe's Cadillac forms app.
So would this change in thinking torpedo FormRouter's business, since Adobe's giving away a large piece of PDF forms workflow for which the Cary, N.C., company charges?
No, says company founder Jim Healy. While the features in Acrobat 8 Pro are pretty nifty—and will enable small forms workflows that might otherwise represent business that could have come to FormRouter—he says they're limited to 500 forms' worth of data collection.
His company, he says, caters to data workflows on a larger scale, in that space between small companies and enterprises large enough to afford the six-figure (after adding the cost of the software, hardware, and training those products typically require) outlay for their own LiveCycle system.
At first blush some pundits might have guessed Adobe was cannibalizing the business of partners trading off Reader's previous inability to save forms data on local hard drives without inconvenient programming workarounds.
In fact, Healy says, these new features in Acrobat 8 Pro will actually help third-party forms vendors like FormRouter, by giving more companies a chance to test drive PDF forms workflows and see their usefulness. He sees it as an opportunity to provide an onramp for more FormRouter enterprise customers.
"I see Acrobat 8 Professional as a fantastic way for the knowledge worker to get started taking advantage of electronic forms," Healy said, adding that once an Acrobat 8 Pro user collects forms data, there's still that problem of what to do with it when it comes in.
Acrobat 8 offers some simple tools for massaging the data, but FormRouter's customers—some of them non-technical types who couldn't "roll their own" forms workflow, anyway—enjoy much more automated processing.
"Because people filling out PDF forms in the free Adobe Reader is limited to 500, and the process of collecting responses requires a manual click of the mouse to aggregate each form," Healy says, "this new functionality does not step on the space FormRouter serves."
FormRouter announced September that it added Lotus Notes support to its service, which potentially opens up the company's services to 110 million new customers.
While the type of data FormRouter collects for its customers through PDF forms already flows well within Lotus Notes environments without need for Acrobat or PDF, Healy says IBM approached FormRouter to develop the PDF piece for companies to interact with their customers and field workers outside firewalls.
"The majority of Lotus Notes databases are behind firewalls in a lot of large companies, and there is a great need to pull forms submitted online from outside the firewall into Lotus Notes and do workflow on those forms," Healy says. "The ideal industries are going to be financial industries—insurance, mortgage financing, etc."
The FormRouter-to-Notes service also can take digitally signed forms from outside firewalls and bring them into Notes with signatures intact, Healy says—a key need for this market space.
Another piece of the FormRouter service that appeals to financial services companies, he says, is the robust security PDF forms offer.
FormRouter previously supported IBM's DB2 database format, but the company had to start from scratch for Notes support.
"We had to figure out how to write to [Notes], and it wasn't an easy thing to do," Healy says. "Lotus Notes is not a normal relational database, it's a different animal altogether. But we figured out how to get data into it so they can use it right away."
In adding Notes support, FormRouter also built support for Domino databases, and ported its client tool to Mac OS X, Solaris, Unix and Linux.
The client app also now can write data to OpenOffice's Calc spreadsheet, which will be a larger component of Notes and Domino moving forward, Healy says.
Not only does this make IBM's tools and FormRouter's services more appealing to a European market leaning away from Microsoft and toward more open standards.
"OpenOffice is extremely significant," Healy says. "[An increasing number of] people don't want a proprietary standard for their document formats, so they've been shying away from anybody who hasn't made their product based on open standards."
Document Management 
