Hi,
David Becker wrote-up a story about the XML forms
market titled "Software makers look for profits in
e-forms".
David writes:
The sudden rush into the market is being fueled by
the potential for big profits. Right now, American
businesses alone spend upward of $15 billion
transferring data from paper-based forms such as loan
applications and purchase orders to their computer
systems, according to analyst estimates.
As usual the tech analysts/trade journalists hype up
their ad-paying customers and downplay open standards.
David writes:
Microsoft is set to intensify the scramble for
customers in the nascent e-forms market later this
month when it releases InfoPath, a key new application
included in Office System, a family of applications
that revolves around the company's widespread
productivity software.
While InfoPath is expected to be used mainly by
employees for internal business processes, Adobe is
looking to tackle a wider swath of customer
interactions with an e-forms approach that casts its
widespread portable document format (PDF) as a basis
for creating and processing easy-to-use e-forms
suitable for loan seekers, online shoppers and other
members of the general public.
A host of smaller companies, meanwhile, hope to play
it down the middle with e-forms packages based on
various flavors of XML, including the recently
finalized XForms specification from the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C).
As usual Microsoft chooses cryptic formats to lock
you in and force you to use their latest and greatest
drag-and-drop mouse-clicky thingy running only on
Windows. David writes:
Any XML-capable application, such as a Web browser,
can view data output from InfoPath, but users will
need the full $199 InfoPath client to input data.
To construct a form (in InfoPath), depending on how
sophisticated a form it is, that can be a fair amount
of work--a couple of days worth for a well-trained
programmer," Duhl said. "There's some scripting you
have to do, some Web services calls--you have to have
a knowledge of your infrastructure."
Full story @
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5089536.html
- Gerald
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