May 16 2008

Users of SharePoint, take note! Implementing online forms to integrate with SharePoint – whether on public-facing websites or intranets – has now been made astonishingly simple. The secret is the new SharePoint Publishing Wizard recently added to Toplevel’s popular OfficeForms system. It allows form designers to quickly create and publish sophisticated forms that connect directly to SharePoint.

For internal forms such as training requests, expense claims and quality monitoring reports, the big advantage is the sheer speed of development. Even sophisticated multi-page forms with calculations and conditional sections can be developed without programming skills. And the combination of SharePoint with OfficeForms makes easy work of managing submitted form data with forms directly submitted to and re-opened from SharePoint document libraries whilst OfficeProcess allows business process analysts to create powerful workflows without programming.

What’s more, because OfficeForms generates accessibility-compliant forms that will work on any browser, even public-facing forms from the Internet can feed into SharePoint, something that other form technologies struggle to deal with.

"As a public body, we need to make sure as many service users as possible can use our online forms," says Heather Mitchell, South Wales Fire "Toplevel’s solutions make it very easy for our staff to create and publish complex forms that work no matter what browsers people are using. We can also be sure forms created with Toplevel’s products will allow us to meet our legal obligations when it comes to accessibility. We are SharePoint users too so we’re very pleased that Toplevel have released this."

Any browser, any configuration

OfficeForms has been designed to be completely browser independent. All the features available to designers through the point-and-click interface in OfficeForms and OfficeProcess will deploy correctly in all popular browsers, as well as in the latest version of Internet Explorer. The widest range of actions – from displaying a message to closing a window to allowing a user to save a partially completely form – can be added. Forms developed in OfficeForms will also work whether or not Javascript has been enabled, meeting the needs of the increasing number of users who have disabled Javascript support in their browser because of security concerns.

What’s more, these forms are accessibility-compliant and automatically work in all popular browsers, dramatically reducing the time that needs to be spent on testing.

Meeting accessibility standards

Providing equal access to services and equal opportunities for employees are key obligations for all organisations – and that means websites and intranets need to meet strict accessibility standards. OfficeForms has been designed from the ground up to automatically generate pages which are accessibility compliant, without the need for custom tweaking by a developer.

Affordable licensing

Toplevel’s licensing model for OfficeForms and OfficeProcess recognises that organisations may need to authenticate many people who are only occasional users. Unlike the per-user licensing of many products, which makes them uneconomic if there are large numbers of users, Toplevel’s licensing has been designed to be affordable for both public-facing and staff-oriented applications.

"Many of our customers choose Microsoft SharePoint for its powerful collaboration, content management and workflow capabilities," explains Jane Roberts, Toplevel’s Sales and Marketing Director. "Our integration of OfficeForms and OfficeProcess with SharePoint demonstrates our commitment to helping our customers make the most of their investment in Microsoft products, by making it easier and quicker for them to roll out complex services while meeting stringent accessibility standards."