Learning e-forms: Part I – Styling

February 26th, 2009 by admin
Process Manager Icon

Process Manager Icon

As my role involves coding more on the front-end development; such as interfaces and scripts; I have always been focusing on the new front-end development technologies such as mooTools and jQuery, and of course cross-browser compatibility issues; especially on the browser we all love-to-hate, Internet Explorer 6.

However we are proudly supporting all A grade browsers across multiple platforms thanks to our development team and innovative intranet platform.

You might be thinking what this has got to do with e-forms… Let me tell you:

Claromentis e-forms feature is part of our Process Manager product which enables you to create forms and assign workflows to them. As of today, I am going through the InfoCapture application (which handles e-form processes) with one of our e-form specialists. This is the first series of posts about learning e-forms feature of the Process Manager product.

With the help of flexible and easy-to-use interface, it is possible to create a complete and fully functioning form with couple of clicks. You can collect various data from various sources, not to mention your intranet users. For example, you can create an expense claim form and let your users fill the necessary areas in the form, even upload the scanned image file of the bill if you need. You can create your own support ticketing system and relief your support team’s workload on managing and dealing with support requests (our own Discover support portal using exactly the same system to manage hundreds of support requests we receive each month).

We always keep saying that we provide a flexible and highly expandable intranet software. Our core code is based entirely on PHP, which is another reason why it is so flexible. And we want to keep the same flexibility on forms as well. Therefore, our form builder enables you to assign CSS styling on every single element of a form. You are free to design your heart out and the system will nicely fetch the your style into your form. You can change the colour, the size, the border; pretty much everything a CSS code enables you. As far as I am aware, there are not many form builders in the market which offers you this level of flexibility.

So what is the advantage of this? First of all (your marketing department will love this), even your forms can carry your branding colours and look and feel. This is very important specially for international clients. You can’t imagine a classic Coca-Cola bottle in a purple can, can you?

In the next post, I am going to talk about workflows. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope this gives you a better understanding about the flexibility of our product.

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  1. February 26th, 2009 at 23:56 | #1

    Great post!

    I’m really looking forward to seeing some great styling examples.

    The Claromentis e-form builder allows you to define CSS styling on the forms, enabelling you to style them however you want/need.

    These aren’t just any e-forms, these are Claromentis e-forms!!!

  2. February 27th, 2009 at 00:10 | #2

    This is interesting. I had thought that some of our earlier form based workflows were not as aesthetically pleasing as they could have been – very corporate and similar.

    Has the code been very much improved in recent releases or are we just paying more attention to styling issues in Process Manager?

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