Forms System for an Organization

For various reasons I've been exploring how to handle forms and reporting across an organization. I thought it might be worthwhile to report on my findings.

Office365 (a somewhat limited version of sharepoint) is an option which is actually made free for non-profit/charity organizations. This is a huge benefit and very generous of Microsoft. Having worked/played with it for some time now my conclusion is that it's great for fairly limited requirements but don't expect it to flex to meet your expectations. The possibilities for automating things are just about zero. I would not recommend Office365 to most orgs.

Google Apps was another possibility at one point, but that was quite some time ago and so I can't recall the pros and the cons. I do know that Google hasn't done themselves any favors with their strangely worded privacy policies and ambiguity about ownership of content on their systems - they have a small but virulent population of people who see them as the Spawn of Satan and this population seems to be focused strongly in the tech sector, the group that would recommend for or against organizational solutions. For whatever reason Google Apps was set aside fairly early on.

Having spent several hours in the last few days researching, exploring, and experimenting with PDF forms I have come to the conclusion that if an organization has someone (or several someones) on staff with some experience in web development the best solution is a roll-your-own with PDF as the basis.

Why?

• PDF is ubiquitous - everybody has a reader so you're not worried about purchasing new software or whatever
• PDF documents are easily manipulated by end users. They can fill out the forms, save a copy, email a copy, etc even if they are fairly resistant to technology.
• PDF creation can be done in OpenOffice Writer or Base for free with almost no programming background.

In my particular case I explored buttons which would email the form (FDF) to a given address. That seemed like a good solution until I saw that I could do the same with XML data - even better since it is easier to parse in PHP. But then I saw that the button could be used as a standard submit button to submit to a web-page. This means a non-technical person can do all the work of making pretty forms and all the programmer has to do is catch the submission, validate the data, and store it.

Unfortunately our commitment to Office365 is such that it is extremely unlikely we will be moving away from it anytime soon. And I am stuck with a head full of research and ideas about how to implement a system of reporting.  And the best I can come up with is this silly blog entry.

Oh, well.