AEM Forms as a Cloud Service: Cloud Is the Future, and there’s More

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Author: Khushwant Sehgal (@KhushwantSehgal).

We live in a world full of great digital and physical experiences. Companies invest heavily in creating personalized and enthralling experiences to capture the attention of their customers. These experiences help companies attract, retain, and grow their customer base.

“Today, people buy experiences, not products, products [aren’t the main] differentiator anymore."— Shantanu Narayan, CEO, Adobe

AEM Forms has helped many organizations deliver great onboarding and enrollment experiences over the years. These experiences have helped organizations convert leads to actual sales, process captured customer data with business workflows, deliver responsive experiences based on the audience profile, and much more.

Now, AEM Forms is available as a Cloud Service. The cloud-native edition of AEM Forms allows you to quickly get started with AEM Forms to build beautiful data capture experiences without setting up local infrastructure. The Cloud Service also offers features to create business processes workflows, integrate data with disparate data source systems, and create e-sign enabled experiences.

Adobe Experience Manager Forms as a Cloud Service allows you to create and host:

• Captivating and responsive enrollment and onboarding experiences
• Data capture experiences enabled to use e-signatures, Document of Record (DoR), and Google reCAPTCHA validations.
• Approval-rejection workflows and complex business processes.

You can also use the Cloud Service to automatically convert existing PDF forms to mobile responsive HTML5 based Adaptive Forms.

“Cloud is one of the biggest reason behind current economic growth with new companies being born and existing companies scaling greater heights faster than ever.” — Vikas Yadav, Group Product Manager, Adobe

Cloud is the future, and there is more!

While benefits like auto-scaling, cost-effectiveness, always up-to-date software, zero hardware management, CI/CD pipel..., the list doesn’t stop here. The service also offers the following to sweeten the deal:

• Faster implementation at a lower cost: The service is a significantly cost-effective data capture (Web and PDF Forms) solutions. You can get on the bandwagon with a low priced-tier and scale up as your operations as usage increase.
• Improved time to value & continuous business agility: The service is significantly faster to provision, easy to maintain, and offers developer-oriented CI/CD-based pipelines. These lead to a quicker roll-out of experiences and a faster time to value. The service has no maintenance cost, automatically updates underlying environments, auto-scales based on load, and offers auto-fail safe functions — this helps maintain continuous business agility with minimum disruption.
• Naturally secure: The service allows only secure HTTPs domains. All data in transit between the service and external components is conducted over secure, encrypted connections using TLS. In addition, AEM includes a FIPS compliant crypto library and has support for a systemwide encryption key, which can be used to encrypt any data in the AEM content repository, for example, configurations or any application data. The service also offers support for automatic key rotation The automatic key rotation process adds another layer of security, to an already robust environment, without adding any manual effort. It automatically renews cryptographic keys at defined intervals, keeping the environment secure. You can refer to Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service Security white paper for an in-depth overview of AEM as a Cloud Service Security.

“Given the tremendous benefits the cloud-native solution offers, moving to cloud is no longer optional — it has become a necessity for every enterprise.” — Salil Taneja, Senior Engineering Manager, Adobe

While Cloud in itself is sufficient reason to move to the service, automatic updates to the service are an outstanding value proposition. These updates bring new features at regular intervals to the service without inducing any downtime to an environment. Adobe takes care of all the backward compatibility and delivery of updates and new features to your environment. Here are some features that are available only for AEM Forms as a Cloud Service environments:

• Free Content Delivery Network (CDN): The service provides free access to Fastly CDN. You can cache Adaptive Forms on the CDN for a faster response and improved rendition time.
• Faster form renditions and Faster server-side validations: You can use CDN and Dispatcher caching to deliver shorter renditions and server-side validations for Adaptive Forms. It helps deliver a better customer experience.
• Enhanced Visual Rule editor: The service provides a hardened Visual Rule editor. It has added support for new events and a form-level scope function. In addition, the rule editor on Cloud Service has dropped the code editor. It does not allow writing rule scripts. You can use the Migration Utility to convert existing rule scripts to custom functions. Your existing rules in Adaptive Forms continue working as it is. These enhancements have reduced dependency on scripting.
• Enhanced Business Process Workflows: AEM Workflows provide the ability to create business processes and automate operations. The service offers enhanced workflow steps to create automated workflows to capture e-signatures, send emails notification to a single person or a group, assign and pass on workflow among multiple users, Save and retrieve data from disparate data sources.
• Secure and improved information flow between forms and Sign: Adaptive Forms and Adobe Sign integration on Cloud Service offer simultaneous data submission and signing activity. It makes form submission independent of signing status, paving the way for faster submissions. On top of it, the service does not save any data on Cloud Service instances, making the signing process super secure.
• Enhanced CAPTCHA component: The utterly new CAPTCHA component allows you to add a global or condition-based CAPTCHA to your Adaptive Form. Out-of-the-box, the component is configured to work with Google reCAPTCHA. You can also add more CAPTCHA services to the component, if required.
• Improved Document of Record support: There are numeral improvements to Document of Record features like a different master page for each page of a Document of Record, pagination options to control the placement of an Adaptive Form panel on a Document of Record, and more.

Along with the above, a new AEM Archetype is released to support AEM Forms as a Cloud Service. It brings reference templates and themes along with configurations and a structure suitable to start developing for AEM Forms as a Cloud Service. It helps you get started quickly with developing for the service.

“I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster, simply carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.” — Steve Jobs

Already an AEM Forms customer? Migration to the cloud is easier than ever

If you are an existing AEM Forms Customer, the service has launched a new migration tooling. The tooling makes it super easy to set up and map existing users and roles with AEM Forms as a Cloud Service environment.

The migration process is easier than ever. It works like a charm. You have to just identify forms practitioners and developers, use migration tooling to prepare forms for transfer, and run the content transfer tool. The service takes care of moving content from an existing instance to AEM Forms as a Cloud Service.

Ready for a demo? Reach out to your Adobe representative or contact Adobe Sales.

Originally published: Apr 5, 2021