Cerenade has been one of the pioneers of the Forms technology, and has been in this business since 1992. They have been instrumental in the evolution of the Forms technology. At this time they have the largest number of successful forms solutions deployed worldwide.

Cerenade's, commercial off-the-shelf portal Enterprise Forms Server can securely publish and manage electronic forms throughout their life cycle. Enterprise Forms Server offers end-users a web interface to fill, sign, validate, spell-check, annotate and incrementally save to local hard disk, save to the server, approve, submit, e-mail, route, track and archive electronic forms and their XML data. Additional features include: Auto-fill, Database Lookup, LDAP and Active Directory support, Reporting, Routing, Archiving, Audit-trail, Server-side Scripting, Custom UI, Custom Messages, Accessibility, ODBC connections to External Data Sources, Serial Number generation and more:

• Import wide variety of form types
• Build Calculation, Validation, and intelligence into the forms.
• Add multiple digital signatures to one form.
• Add Dynamic / Scrollable Tables.
• Add barcode - PDF417, PostNet and other types.
• Use Object Library to reuse and share common objects and scripts among forms.
• On-line, Cerenade forms are Filler-Free, which means there are no desktop installations on the client PC.
• Off-line users download Cerenade's Thin and FREE Filler application.

Support for Industry Standards

While adhering to a component-based open architecture, a great deal of emphasis has been put on providing support for industry standards such as XML, PKI, ASP/JSP, ODBC/JDBC, COM/DCOM, .NET, HTML/XHTML, XPS, PDF and LDAP from within Cerenade's family of E-Forms products.

Alleviating Dependence on a Single E-Forms Vendor

Users of the E-Forms technology should not be subjected to a closed proprietary technology thereby locking users into a non-portable solution which can only be maintained and upgraded solely by the vendor of a proprietary technology. In order to realise this goal, the following three components have been designed, developed and integrated into Cerenade's Visual eForms family of products:

• A comprehensive conversion facility for importing E-Forms designed with the proprietary technology of other vendors.
• An open E-Forms format along with an export facility capable of converting forms in Cerenade's format to other industry-standard E-Form formats.
• An open, extensible, standards-based filler component which is interoperable with and can easily be integrated into other enterprise solutions.

Component-based Open Architecture

In today's world, applications are viewed as and built from a collection of cooperating software components thereby increasing programmer's productivity, code sharing and code maintainability. Cerenade is the first to apply this methodology to E-Forms applications by developing a component-based E-Forms engine. Advantages of this approach are:

• Deployable in both Web-based and desktop applications
• Extensible
• Easy to integrate with other enterprise applications
• Results in reduced costs and increased savings

Workflow

• Design Role/Rule based workflow scenarios
• Cerenade Workflow module provides a binding mechanism for linking e-forms with the Workflow model.