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Business Challenge
Some areas of our lives still rely on paper forms, especially when you turn for help to various agencies.
Designated organizations use such forms to deliver special services for citizens; and to report about services
delivered to governing organizations. Paper forms usually generate many errors and make it difficult to
find the required information.
Our customer discovered great potential of a service that will replace paper forms with a digital solution.
The idea of his investment was to allow users create electronic forms that will have the same appearance as
paper forms but you are able to fill them out on a PC. To reduce filling errors, the application should perform
data validation, and parameters for such validation should be flexibly configured by the administrator.
Software Solution
The customer was looking for a .Net company providing creative thinking and solid expertise and outsourced the
development of a competitive digital form solution to Axmor Software.
The custom software is designed by Axmor's developers to serve a number of organizations that heavily rely on
paper documents. Almost any printed form can be designed to be used by agencies. Clerks can now fill, save, and
retrieve forms in a very convenient way on their PCs. Digital form simplifies data entering, so claim processing
takes less time. The electronically saved data can then be used for creation of a range of reports.
The advanced user management capabilities and administrative control over user activities make the application
ready to run on large networks.
Axmor's .NET developers solved a range of complicated tasks to make the application convenient for use,
applicable to different industries, and competitive.
Creation of any custom form
The software provides form design capabilities and allows for conversion of almost any printable paper form into
a digital form. The developed Form Constructor incorporates the best industry experience and provides as much
flexibility in form layout creation as MS InfoPath or Visual Studio 2005. Form Constructor is a WYSIWYG form
modeling engine, with all vital form design controls available. The comprehensive functionality allows for creation
of various layouts and field types, making the software solution suitable for different industries.
The constructor supports:
- Absolute positioning.
- Customization of control appearance.
- Automatically calculated fields.
- Validation rules.
- Drag and drop technology.
- Hiding rarely used fields.
- Multiple responses to a single question.
As a result, a designed digital form surpasses a paper form in convenience, ease of use, and filling speed.
Flexible Report Design
Filling forms is usually part of the workflow, and competitive solutions should provide ways for their further
development. To address this need, Axmor's .NET developers created an original reporting component. The application
allows for the design of table reports associated with the custom forms. The input data can be consolidated into
a statistical summary, and various calculations can be added.
Familiar Windows-style User Interface
Axmor's .NET developers dramatically improved software usability as compared to the initial sketches. Standard
toolbars, familiar menus, and regular screens are easy to learn and use. The Office 2007 style of interface makes
the application intuitive and user-friendly for any PC user.
Occasionally Connected Application Scenario
The client organizations access the data over the Internet (refer to Image #1)
Image 1. High-level software architecture.
Even if the Internet connection is lost, operators should be able to continue working with applicants. To address
this need, Axmor's .NET developers implemented a cutting-edge architectural scenario of an occasionally connected
application. Like in MS Exchange, the user can fill forms regardless of Internet availability, and the local data
is transferred to the server as soon as connectivity is re-established.
Strong Protection of Sensitive Personal Data
The application saves all of the data to the central server, so the critical requirement was to protect the server
from security threats. As the first step, Axmor's .NET developers implemented the permission based access model as
flexible as to define permitted operations for each role or even for each user. Password protection and data
encryption are combined with architectural solutions, which are suggested by developer company.
Modular software design
Axmor's .NET developers made provisions for easy software enhancement and modification. They achieved this through
a modular architecture, where each of the software components is independent. Any component of this application or
of the entire solution can be re-used to implement another custom workflow and make modifications at low cost.
Keeping on the edge of evolving technology
Starting the project discussion with a requirement to have .NET 1.1 as a target platform, Axmor's developers
recommended .NET 2.0, which was becoming more popular. In addition, the current version of the server side
uses .NET 3.0 - from early 2007 - as the most advanced and capable technology for project needs.
The customer is satisfied with the advanced capabilities of the developed form design and filling solution and
continues to evolve the product with the help of technical advice from Axmor's .NET developers.
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