Adobe FormsCentral

Adobe's FormsCentral provides form-building capabilities found in other business productivity solutions such as Microsoft Access  and Homestead.

What FormsCentral gives you over the others is good, quick, and easy-to-use Business Intelligence capability integrated with form design. The BI components allow businesses to analyze data gathered from submitted forms, which can be embedded in websites, Facebook pages, Twitter, or in email campaigns. In addition, FormsCentral is a good way to create some neat forms for interacting with visitors and customers to your site—without having to beg your developer buddies for help (or hire one!).

Pricing and Setup

A free version of FormsCentral lets you try out the service but comes with too many restrictions to be worthwhile. You can create just one form and collect up to 50 responses. Worse, you don't get any of the BI functionality, which, to me, is the real value proposition of FormsCentral.

There's a $14.99 per month account for creating up to five forms, receiving up to 500 responses per form. You also get advanced capabilities like adding attachments, BI analysis, and other features like redirecting users to a URL after submitting a form and submission notification. The highest-tiered subscription is billed at $199 per year. This version gives unlimited form creation, 5,000 responses per form, and all the features already mentioned. Paid subscribers can upload attachments of up to 20MB per form. Free users can upload attachments up to 100KB.

View all 6 photos in gallery

To sign up, users have to create an Adobe.com account. You can test out a free trial account but, again, it does not give you all the features—which is unfortunate because I think potential subscribers should be able to test the full logics and business intelligence embedded in the solution on a temporary basis.

Once you log in to FormsCentral, a dashboard screen opens up and guides you through setting up a new form from scratch, or lets you choose from among the many templates included.

There are templates to fulfill a variety of purposes: registering for an event, for market research surveying, grant applications, and more. Adobe has templates listed in a number of categories, such as HR, Education, and Sales.

Respondents who fill out the forms can access them on mobile devices, as FormsCentral supports iOS 4.2.1 devices and Android 2.2 devices or later.

The FormsCentral Experience

The interface has the same elegant design found in many of the solutions that make up the Acrobat.com ecosystem. It's sharp, easy-on-the-eyes, user-friendly, and highly-navigable.

Anyone used to working in a productivity suite should have little problem creating and customizing forms. The forms are quite customizable as far as changing backgrounds, colors, fonts, and adding images. I did notice you can't edit images embedded into forms. The image has to be edited in an external editor and then uploaded and added to the form—kind of a time-waster. Even simple edits like cropping and so on would be extremely helpful, and, if any company should be able to include that functionality, it's Adobe.

Form designers can also assign user roles to forms, which is good for team collaboration. User roles include Author, Co-Author, Contributor, and Reader.

A large part of form customizing is adding items. These items can include checklists, radio buttons, email, and data fields. Users can apply logic to those fields: for example, you can setup a rule whereby if someone answers "No" to one question on the form, another entire section can become visible or hidden.

Only simple "Yes" or "No" conditional statements can be applied, but that is still good enough to let users create some very professional forms.

There are other "behavioral" options you can add to forms. If you have a form you no longer want users to fill out, you can add a closed message that users will see upon accessing the form. Whenever someone clicks to submit a form you can setup a custom confirmation message or just use the canned one setup in FormsCentral. Users can also be redirected to a URL upon form submission.

Adobe makes it simple to distribute forms and provides several ways. You can make a form available as a dedicated link from the FormsCentral website or as an embeddable widget.

The process of creating the form was smooth, and any rules and fields I created, tested without any problems. However what impressed me the most was the BI integration and the potential for quick and easy integration of data collected from forms into existing line-of-business applications like CRM and financial systems.

After users have submitted forms, you can view the results of that submitted data within the FormsCentral dashboard. User responses are displayed in a tabular format. FormsCentral users can work with the table in much of same way as with a spreadsheet, adding data and formulas as needed. The data is exportable as a PDF, CSV, or Excel file.

FormsCentral also gives graphical representation of data in the form of colorful charts. Charts offer a quick glance at valuable information such as the percentage of users who answered a question in a particular way. Business users are given relatively affordable and quite easy way to collect important data for further analysis and for importing it into existing systems.

Big Value for Data Analysis

Data is perhaps the most valuable resource in business. With FormsCentral, users are given access to this precious resource with a user-interaction tool that's both affordable and easy to use. For businesses that rely on analysis of their current and potential client base, Adobe FormsCentral could prove to have real ROI. It's a four star Editors' Choice for its simple form design capabilities and especially for the data analysis it could enable for small businesses.

 More Small Business Software Reviews: