Too Many Products to choose from HELP

[Former Community Member]

Ok At this point I have Acrobat Pro on a few user desktops. They are saving partially completed copies forms all over the place and at times saving to the origional form rather than a copy. We are a very small company and as such so is our current budget. What I would like to be able to do is this;

1. Allow my users to fill out a web form or some other form say in our customer database application and store that information.

2.Once complete a PDF document can be generated with the proper fields populated with the client specific data. I still need to be able to edit the data in these fields later if an error is detected on it's travels. Some other fields will also be blank for client fill in.

3. Once the PDF is generated I need to e-mail it to a recipiant for review and completion(I would like to be able to let them save the changes they make in case they are unable to fill out the entire form in one sitting.

4. Once completed (and this is the easy part) They just print it sign it and send it back to us via snail mail. e-mail return is out of the question here because we need origional signatures.



As I understand it I need the reader extensions thing but do i really need the forms server or another product, can I achieve all this with just the one product. If not I supose i can just learn to live with my users saving documents willy nilly all over the place. I have only about 3 or 4 users who will be generating the partially completed documents for clients and the number of folks these docs will be sent to is fairly small at present as well say perhaps 6 or 8 seperate documents prepaired for 2 to 4 clients per week. I need to baby the clients to shepord them through our process and i need to control my users habits but in the end what i need is a cheap KISS(Keep It Simple Stupid) style solution.



thnaks for the help and by the way I a preferable to VB and .NET but if i have to go all JAVA I can dust off my J2EE stuff i have laying around.

[Former Community Member]

If you have users with the free Adobe Reader on their desktops and you want save-off line capability then you will definitely need Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions.



Adobe LiveCycle Forms will make things much easier for you but you could scale down your solution and do some manual Java programming yourself with the XPAAJ library. You must own a LiveCycle product to take advantage of these tools though.



On the other side, how many people will be interacting with these forms?

[Former Community Member]

With any single form prior to it being printed perhaps 5 or 6 depending on what happens once it enters the clients location then it's a tossup but total on an average document it would pass through 5 to 6 before printing. As far as prepopulating the forms on our side we currently have 2 ladies who would be doing that then the documents would go to one of our 2 producers for review prior to it being sent to the client where however they feel like dealing with the remaining data entry would be up to them. I would be the pitiful soul drawing the fields on the form and then setting it up for the office to use.



So as I have rambled I have 5 users who may deal with a document prior to it's desemination to a client.



I think that's what you asked...It's still early!

[Former Community Member]

Brian, it sounds like the entire process for your forms involves a very limited number of people interacting with the document and fewer who will actually receive the final document for review.



Reader Extensions would be "overkill" for you. Especially since it sounds like everything you need is in Acrobat 8 Professional. What I would suggest is downloading the eval of 8 and taking a look at the new features. Especially the forms piece that lets you send out and compile results from forms sent out to a small number of individuals.