Although IBM’s Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration product lines have long sported electronic form capabilities, PureEdge adds a new XML technology based on XForms, standards proposal before the W3C that the Victoria, British Columbia firm coauthored.
The acquisition of the 70-person privately held firm is scheduled to be closed on July 22. Founded in 1993, PureEdge currently offers a forms designer and viewer, plus capability to convert XML forms to HTML and JavaScript web pages, and a development environment for server-based forms applications.
The importance of e-forms to IBM is underscored by the fact that, of 37 vertical industry middleware solutions that the company has identified, 29 of them need electronic forms. Of those 29, IBM and PureEdge are actively working on 10 solutions opportunities.
Currently, PureEdge’s solutions have been in large organizations, ranging from GE to Ford, JPMorganChase, the FBI, US Air Force, and National City Bank. IBM indicates that it will continue working with third party providers to develop e-forms vertical solutions sitting atop these software stacks.
And it will look for opportunities to promote the PureEdge e-forms solutions through its small-midsize business oriented Express go-to-market programs.
IBM’s strategy is not necessarily to migrate the Notes or Dominoes e-forms installed base, but to provide interoperability with the PureEdge-based XForms-based technology.
There is no reason to migrate existing forms, said Mark Upson, CEO of PureEdge, who will be joining IBM as a vice president as part of the deal. The goal is to provide the model of [forms information] exchange.
PureEdge has already developed interfaces with Lotus WorkPlace, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Content Manager. During the remainder the year, IBM will incorporate PureEdge into the Lotus division, focusing primarily on market development.
During the first half of next year, the strategy will promote further development of the XForms standard, and the beginning of work to integrate PureEdge into the IBM products for which it already has links.
The technology at the center of all this, XForms, is a W3C draft standard that takes a component-based approach to forms development. Separating content from presentation, XForms provides a standard set of form controls or visual elements that replace today’s XHTML form controls.
It also provides a model for expressing the data that is collected on the form, supporting features such as workflow, auto-fill, and pre-fill. A submit protocol defines how XForms send and receive data.
To date, Sun, Oracle, Novell, the Mozilla Project, and others have or are currently developing draft implementations of XForms. However, missing from the table is Microsoft, whose rival InfoPath XML forms generator, introduced in Office 2003, is based on its own proprietary technology.
Although it would be a logical way to promote widespread adoption of the new technology, IBM has not said whether it would consider offering PureEdge’s forms viewer on a free basis just as Adobe has with PDF.
