The average person—for example, the HR person who wants to take vacation requisitions online, or the accountant who wants to computerize purchase orders—doesn’t want to get IT involved for one or two lousy forms. They don’t want to lay out six-to-10 figures for enterprise-class software for forms creation and a back-end system to support the 25 people who will use the simple forms.
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I agree with this sentiment. It is frustrating that the industry still struggles to catch up to where Lotus Notes was nearly 15 years ago.
I love the idea of capturing forms data as XML but the XForms stuff I’ve played with has either been too simplistic for complex forms (Documentum Forms Builder), too difficult to integrate with back-end repositories (Adobe), or not ready for prime time (Chiba). All of them require more than business expertise to implement.