Forms for beginners...

[david-does-dobe]

Hello,

I've recently been 'placed' into a new role in work that involves web design and more importantly form design. We are local government so safe to say that the training is near non-existant. I was hoping to post a few questions and get a few answers to help set me on my way, so please feel free to show just how much I don't know about designing forms!

We have licences for 5 SAP interactive forms although I don't want them to interact with SAP (the cost rules this out) but what I'm curious to know is:

Can the SAP interactive forms be formatted so that they can be saved, amended and submitted via email as an attachment? essentially becoming a 'basic' form.

Do I need licences to allow users to do the above?

What are the design capabilities of SAP forms? i.e. what can you do with them?

Any help would be very much appreciated?

Thank you in advance!

[Former Community Member]

The designer you get with SAP is designed to work with SAP and features have been added to assist you in that endeavor. By the license agreement any form you make with that designer will count towards the 5 that you have licensed (whether they actually interact with SAP or not). I woudl strongly suggest that you do not use one of those licenses for these forms (it makes for a very expensive form design). I woudl suggest that you buy a copy of Acrobat (the standard Designer is shipped with Acrobat), and use that Designer to build these other forms that do not interact with SAP. I think you might find it easier to design with this one as well as there is no SAP "stuff" in the Designer to cause confusion.

Hope that helps

Paul

[david-does-dobe]

Paul

Thank you for the speedily reply.

As we haven't yet purchased any of the design software I'll keep your comments in mind. From what you have said it may appear that we have purchased the SAP licences a little prematurely as we are nowhere near ready to start designing SAP interactive forms. (I say 'we' but really I mean me!)

On that note, if I purchased Acrobat could I design and use as many forms as I liked without a licence for each? to put it in to context I have the task of redesigning all forms we use (approx 30 used regularly & 50 or so less common), it would appear to be less cost effective for us if we had to buy licences for each. More importantly the user still has to be able to save to their desktop, complete and email to a recipient - can you do this with the Acrobat software??

Thanks again,

david

[Former Community Member]

The reason why the SAP licensing is so high is that it uses server side technology to render the form as a PDF when it is required by the user. This is needed so that SAP data can be inderted into the form at that time. If you want to build forms that have nothing to do with SAP then by buying a copy of Designer (through Acrobat) you are in fact rendering the form when you finish building it and are distributing the rendered form. You can do as many of these as you want. The ability to save locally and email completed forms is not part of the form design but part of the software that is reading the PDF (Acrobat or Reader). If your users are using Acrobat then there are no issues - they can save locally and submit whatever they like). If they are using Reader then you  will have to Reader Extend the form to allow for this functionality. Now it gets confusing. The ability to Reader Extend the form exists in two places ..... the full functionality is on the server and a subset of the functionality exists in Acrobat (local save and dig sigs). Acrobat also places a license restriction that the form can only be distributed to 500 people.

So with your copy of Acrobat you woudl Reader Extend the form before distributing it. If you want to do more than that then you will  need to determine if it makes more sense to buy copies of Acrobat for everyone or get a server based Reader Extensions license.  In your case you are only interested in the local save so from what you have described that one copy of Acrobat is all you need (assuming you are distributing to < 500 users).

Hope that helps

Paul

[david-does-dobe]

Excellent!

Thank you for that - You've outlined my predicament well and highlighted the potential problems I may come up against, one of which being the number of people to distribute too. Any form I design will have to be available to the entire department - which is it stands is considerably more than 500...

I'll check out the costs involved in purchasing the Reader Extended Licence & Acrobat licences, however I have a feeling that the overall costs may price the PDF option out of our remit.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it.

Cheers

David

[Former Community Member]

I suggest that you talk to an Adobe rep about the licensing there are always gov discounts as well as other licensing options. We have only spoken in general terms.

Paul

[david-does-dobe]

Will do,

Thanks again

David