ProductFocusCCUBE EFORMSFrom Document Manager Magazine Vol 20 No 05 - September/October CCube Solutions' approach to eForms is a concept far more advanced than simply collecting data and passing it
to a database. Their approach allows a huge range of intelligence to be applied to the process from start to finish.. As electronic forms are
used more and more in
mobile applications via
tablets and other devices, in
sectors from healthcare to law
enforcement, it has become
increasingly important to offer
a way to develop forms that
involves minimal involvement
from the IT department, while
also exploiting the user
interface advances possible in
such devices. Turnaround
times and costs are far better
managed if forms can be developed by
the user themselves to accurately reflect
- and often feed into - their existing
business processes.
This is exactly the approach
championed by CCube Solutions in
their eForms module. Once the product
is bought, users can develop and
deploy as many forms as they need to,
in any environment. Where integration
with back-end systems needs to be
done, CCube offers a rapid service to
do this for new users. More
experienced forms users may well have
expertise in house to achieve this
themselves, of course.
The CCube eForms product is entirely
open in terms of what it will integrate
with: it is not dependent on the user
also having the CCube EDMS system,
for instance, or indeed any other
specific EDM platform. It does include
connectors into CCube's EDM, and they
can offer connectors to other systems
such as OpenText or Documentum as
required, creating the potential for very
powerful workflow automation.
The demonstration we reviewed
included links direct from a clinician's
iPad to the ER room's electronic
whiteboard system, for instance. Forms
once developed are fully .NET
compliant and can be published to a
number of different popular device
environments, from iPad to Android as
well as on PC systems. A completed
form is typically saved in PDF format,
which can be easily passed to all sorts
of systems, and at the same time the
form data is saved in a SQL database
for almost universal portability.
Features include: data validation
during the data entry process,
intelligent navigation, real-time
calculations - to display the results
while the user is keying in data - and
integration with back-end systems. The
CCube design mantra is simple: "Key the
data once for re-use
wherever necessary to drive
back-end systems."
The current version of
CCube's eForms module,
v3.4, is very much an 'out of
the box' product offering,
and designed to be as easy
to use as possible for nontechnical
users.
The system
has been hugely enhanced
to reflect the rapid recent
growth in using tablets for
data collection tasks - the
touchscreen interface allows for far
more intuitive forms design and CCube
have been very smart in including userfriendly
options such as sliders and
other 'hand gesture' interfaces. Users
such as clinicians will find the array of
options open to them, from
handwritten notes to marking up
sketches on medical images, make it
much easier for them to record the
information they need to do their jobs,
and pass it to the relevant workflows
and processes.
Two-way lookups allow data to be
passed between the forms application
and supporting databases in real time,
altering the process flow, so that for
instance a user having selected 'teetotal'
will then not be shown subsequent
questions relating to the last drink
taken. The intelligence behind the
forms means that very sophisticated
validation is a matter of course.
More info: www.ccubesolutions.com ProductFocus
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