Question about forms

[tpurifoy]

We are looking at replacing Groover in our operation.  We have a temporary work around for the fact that there is no shared calendar at this point in Collanos (hopefully something that will be addressed in the future), but the one thing we have not figured out how to do is duplicate the forms feature of Groove. 

We build forms that users can use to enter specific information, and then we build a view to display that information.

Is there something in Collanos that would duplicate that feature?  Or is there some software anyone knows of that would let us duplicate that functionality as a work around?

Thanks!

[elnaffar]

You may think of using MS InfoPath forms where each user uses the template form you design to fill the personal data. Eventually, each user saves her data in the shared space of Collanos (it will be an xml file).

There is a way in InfoPath that allows aggregating all data collected from users -- never tried though, but I am aware that there is.

MS InfoPath is part of the Office Suite.

[tpurifoy]

Thanks for the reply.  We have discussed this option as a workaround, but since we are a Mac shop, we do not have InfoPath.  If this turns out to be the only option, we will use a PC to create the forms, but it would be very nice if we could do all of this work natively on the Mac and even better if we could do it within the product.

Thanks!

[elnaffar]

You are welcome. Another way is to use Excel sheets. How? Let each user fill in the form and save it with a specific name/ID. Then create a master (another) Excel sheet that has external reference links to each individual file.

With a very careful design, you can get all data easily in the master file (I did it before!).

[Franco Dal Molin]

Good discussion, and great ideas for workarounds!

The original Collanos vision includes an advanced forms tool that we call "Business Model Designer".  It is much more powerful than just a simple "flat" forms tool, essentially allowing power users to create complete object models (hence the name), including relations between different object types, forms, permissions, and even adding custom Java code. These deployable models can then be used to create new workspaces. The tool is still in prototype stage. Unfortunately, due to limited resources we had to shift development priorities and focus the work on the standard Workplace application first. Development on the Designer has paused, but we could resume in the future. So much about our designer tool vision.

Your discussion about using InfoPath made me think about introducing a "very simple forms tools" solution, instead of our development-intensive, albeit much more powerful, designer approach. We could create a special new object type for simple forms, that uses XML as internal data format (instead of being relational database oriented). A simple wizard could help the user create these form objects, by adding new fields as needed. In a first version the "layout" of the forms could be done quite simple, for instance just by sorting fields in a fixed one or two columns grid. This would minimized development work massively, compared to a graphical free layout forms designer.

Would such a simple forms tool address your needs?