Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the Arbery Digital Experiences podcast where strategy meets technology.
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[00:00:18] Speaker B: All right, welcome to Arbery Digital Experiences. This is episode 20.
I'm Tad Reeves, principal architect at Arbery Digital. I'm joined today by Eric Stevens, Vice president of Strategic engagement at fourpoint, who is an AM forms expert. And today we're going to talk about AEM Forms and forms in general, which is, it doesn't get the limelight unfortunately. A lot of times at, at the big conferences and so forth. It's not the, it's not the big sexy generative AI, generative video generated this and that, that, that steals all the headlines. However, it is really what runs the meat and potatoes of actually getting business done. So, so I wanted to give it its due course here and there's a lot of things I think that are misunderstood, not understood, not fully appreciated about the role that Forms does play and can play in any business website. So I want to give enough time for us to talk about this. This is going to be actually a fascinating session for anybody who has done any architecture on a business to business side, business to consumer site. There is, there's a lot of guts that requires well, well architected forms. So Eric, thank you for coming on the show.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Oh, my pleasure. Happy to do it.
And, and something I love talking about. So it's gonna be for me.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Well, great. So you, you. So you've been in the forms business for a, really, for, for quite some time.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: For, for a really long time. I officially started in 1992 as a product manager with a company out of Canada called Delrina who had a forms product called Perform Pro that was sold to the US Air Force, the Army and a large number of different companies. Previous to that I'd worked on systems around document scanning, optical character recognition, so forms processing on the data capture side of things.
And then in 1996, a company called Jet form acquired the assets out of Delrina, the form's assets. And so I moved into that and that brought together the fillable side, which was the Delrina side of things, and the print side which was the Jet form side of things.
Then Adobe acquired all of those technologies in 2003 and turned those into AEM forms that we see today. So it's quite fascinating for me having that history and a lot of the folks from 4.4 Point was actually founded right after Adobe acquired that technology because they needed services related to that technology.
And so Ex Jet form folks formed the company to be able to provide those services. So it's fun for me to be back involved with it. Okay. I took some time in between there to do other things like document management and records management and security software and you know, a startup and those kinds of things.
So being back into it and talking about really the same issues we were talking about in the 90s. Okay. Coming back in and going, wait, they're still using what? Okay, there are still customers out there today that are using the Jetform product as it was delivered in the late 90s, what was called central still customers out there using it, which is a testimony to, you know, the robustness of the software that we built back then.
But it's also a reflection of forms in business as a whole. It's what you about them not having the, the, the cachet.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Well, it's true, but so, but if you think about it, so, so just, just look at this from a timeline perspective. Right, right. Because. Yeah, so, so Adobe, which is for, for the public, it's there they're mostly known for their consumer products in terms of the design software.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Very true.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Photoshops and illustrators and InDesign and all that sort of thing that, that whole side of the business. But from a, from the, from the other side, the complete other side, you look at how they acquire. They, they already had PDF as a format, they already had acro.
And so, but if you look at them getting into forms and realizing that this is a big deal, a form is the, is the destination for every other acquisition that they made afterwards. Because 2003, you look at that, that's even before the omniture acquisition.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: So, so that was before they got into analytics which that, that led into later things like in 2000, was it 10 or 11 where they, where they acquired day software and that's. That ultimately ended up bringing CQ into, into the system as AEM as we now know it as a. And then the whole forms, the whole lifecycle product ended up finally under the AM umbrella.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: But all of that, if you look at everything that it's done, from tracking somebody to going out and marketing to somebody successfully bringing them in, showing them about your product and so forth on a successfully created website, that the end of all that is the person signing up.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: You know what I mean? So it's still the destination.
So it's almost like Adobe was like good, we got the Destination. Well now we have to, now we have to get all of the other sub products that, that get somebody back to the destination of like. Because nobody, like, like you and I before this were talking about General Motors, which we're going to talk about some more.
Like everybody knows, everybody knows what a Corvette looks like or Cadillac, you know, an Escalade or something like that. And they get all worked up about, you know, these great product shots and so forth. Nobody really says, you know what's really great about General Motors is you ever buy a car? How about that way that you sign up? Like nobody's ever talking about the forms.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: So I'll give you. So let's talk about the General Motors example. Okay. This was a session that was done at Summit and folks can go to the Summit website. All of the sessions are available. There's a lot of fabulous sessions. There's a bunch of really good keynotes with interviews with CIOs and CEOs major companies. The Coke one is fantastic. JP Morgan Chase is fantastic.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: But the, the General Motor session was a forms oriented session. And they talked about how they used AEM adaptive forms to create a contact page. And I put it in quotes because people think contact page, well, that's a trivial operation.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: I, it's a first name, last name, email submit.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Right. So why would you use something as sophisticated and powerful as AEM Forms? Ah, because what they're doing is they're linking it to the user profile and information. So as you go through their sites, they're identifying which vehicles you're looking at, which trim packages you're looking at, they're identifying your location. So now when you go to say I want to test drive the form, the contact form that pops up is now there's a dealer within five miles of you.
They have the vehicle, they have the Corvette you were looking at with the trim package. Do you want to set up an appointment? Oh, and that form that you see is completely branded in the appropriate General Motors brand, whether it's Buick or whatever it happens to be. And they're giving you that information. So what they're doing is changing it so that they're getting that tighter linkage between what they're tracking and that closure rate associated with it. But the beauty of the forms product was that they didn't have to build one for every brand, they built one. And they're able to dynamically re skin it as they needed to. That means that from a legal perspective, a terms and conditions, an integration perspective, they simplified all of their maintenance and operations to really take advantage of it and allow the marketing people to be able to go, I want to add this or I want to add that or I need a new one that does this kind of thing. And now they have a framework for creating those kinds of things. And that's where the challenge often comes into play. Right. Is how do you get that so that people are encouraged to create these dynamic things and yet still have data integration, population of information, knowledge of where the other dealers are, all of that which is heavy architecture and infrastructure. Right. That you can't have the marketing people coming back to architecture folks and going, okay, now I need this. Well, we don't collect that data. Right.
You can't use it. So that was a really, really great example of how you can take those forms and really use them in a marketing sense.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Right, totally.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: And tie that into story together.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. So, so, so here. So, so I wanted to talk about like what A M Forms is. What, what is it? How is, like how what is. Unfortunately, this is a little bit like, you know, nebulous, nebulous naming because people run have forms that they've created in Adobe Experience Manager and then there's also a product called AEM Forms. Like isn't that same thing? You're like, no, no, it's absolutely not the same thing.
Right, yeah, even before we got it. So you just mentioned something that is, that is a fascinating subject even in and of itself that I wanted to, to bring up. So what, so, so you talk about architecture, like data architecture. Right? And so, so before you even would get into like, what is the, what is the feature set of AEM Forms from a, from an architecture standpoint, when you, when you go into, to architect a, a new website project for somebody and they're like, oh, we're moving from this to this. What do you want? Well, well. And then you're talking about publishers and you're talking about how, how the front end is going to get served and what are people going to see and so forth.
I almost feel like that's a little bit missing the boat because like. So hold on, hold on.
What is, what is, what is, what is the whole thing going to do? You've got people who are arriving, they're going to see something, they're going to successfully receive a message and then what do they do? What happens after that?
Is it add to cart? They book a room? Are they booking a cruise? They send a form to somebody? Are they trying to buy a car? Do you want to send somebody into a Dealership. Like where, so where's the data going? And what's, what are the conversion points and thinking of it from, from the standpoint of good. So, so then now, now we're starting to talk about nuts and bolts of what, you know, real computer stuff. Like where, like, good, good. So where, where does it go? What do you want this thing to do? What ideally would you like to capture that would make the, the, the marketing and the sales cycle the most successful and, and the easiest on the customer?
So, and where, like, so how, how do you end up getting brought into architecture discussions like that? Or do you end up just getting, you know, silver plattered, a bunch of requirements?
[00:11:09] Speaker A: No. Oh, my God, no.
Oh. Oh. See, part of the challenge is, is that rarely at a forms level do people, the organizations understand what the business requirements are associated with them because they've been around so long. But let me give you a what not to do story on that connection between the marketing behaviors and the sales behaviors and the closure behaviors. And what I'm going to do is give an example from a mortgage application. Okay? Ton of documents, ton of forms associated with it, a lot of information, Some of it you got to fill out, some of it you needed all of that kind of stuff. So this was actually our vice president of sales. Okay. Went to do a renewal on his mortgage. Okay. He went and did the online research. He looked at different options associated with it. Fantastic. Websites delivered all of the content calculators associated with it. Great interactions with people. Decided he was going to move it and go to this bank. Okay, great. Fills out online in a nice experience. Key information.
That's great.
Then they say, okay, you've got to come in in person and you've got to sign it. Okay, well, now first off, that's problem number one, okay?
Because the other thing that's related to forms is everybody goes, you got to sign them. Okay. And you don't. Okay, the laws in US, Canada, Europe, Australia, all say no. A digital signature is fine except in very specific cases usually associated with wills, power of attorney, okay? Death record, that kind of thing. Okay, all right, fine. But for all commercial transactions, digital signatures are fully accepted. Okay, so why do I have to. Why aren't you sending me a document? No, no, we got to go through it. Okay, so he goes in, he sits down with the advisor, who pulls out a sheaf of paper and proceeds to go through the paper page by page, scratching out sections and entire pages that are not applicable and having him initial the changes on those. Wait, so you produced a Boilerplate document that had some of the data merged in. Okay. But not all of it. You know where I live. Why are you scratching out the clause for the other states, you know where I live, why is it there? Well, because your system doesn't know how to produce a form. Because this is a form. It's data merged to a template. That's what it comes down to is data merged into a template or data entered into a template. And they don't know how to do that. Okay. And they don't know what the rules are. So there's a person who has to go through that process. So he went through a wonderful online experience, tracked all of the good marketing stuff that was completely broken when he got to the actual sale process. And we see this so many times in so many different organizations where these, these pieces are the failure points. No matter what you do in the marketing on the acquisition side of things, if your post acquisition experience is horrible, then people aren't going to like it. And, and that's what often where the forms are used in the post acquisition part. And so that's a real struggle for organizations because they're doing it the way they did it 30 years ago.
Okay. They're just one step away from forcing you to roll it into a typewriter. All right? I mean, it's a joke. Why is it 8 and a half by 11? Why can't I fill it out on my mobile device? Okay. Why is it restrictive? Why is it dumb? Okay. I have an example that I use of a bank who's a customer of ours, and they have some older forms. They haven't migrated them. You go in and they're what we call acrofill. They were Adobe Acrobat, it was a Word document. Adobe Acrobat laid on top of it. Well, this is good enough. They have a percentage field. I can type Bob into the percentage field. There's more validation. There's no nothing. How many errors do you get on that? How many problems do you get on? Oh, well, we want it filled out in the browser. Okay? AEM forms will let you fill it out in the browser. You can do this. We can solve this problem.
And that's part of the challenge, is even customers who have AEM forms still use it the way that they used it in the Jetform days for print. They don't know that they have a tool that would allow them to take those same forms, put them online and grab information in a browser, put it in and then disperse the data because that's the other Piece that happens is, oh no, I created a good form, but you need reader to fill it out. Or I've got an acro fill form. So I got it in the browser, but you're still forcing the user to fill it out, print it, sign it, scan it and email you the copy back. Right. And you just want the data, you got to rekey the data. Why are you doing that? Right.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: And, and what's interesting is, is that so if you take small, small transactions, right, you take, you know, buying something on Amazon or something like that. Everybody, anybody who's done any E commerce would consider the cart experience and the checkout experience as a part of Ecom.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: They would just. Nobody would, nobody would say, well, that's a different department. We're just talking about the website right now. Exactly. No, no, no, no. The person has ordered, they expect delivery. You want to track that thing when it's on its way. Like, yes, this is, this is, this is the system. Right?
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: And just even the idea that it wouldn't be a part of a revamp, it seems like, yeah, you would need to really convince folks that I get that this has always been the way.
You should really thoroughly consider rearchitecting this as a part. It may increase the scope. You're going to get a lot more sales. Why do you think people don't want to go into a car dealership sometimes?
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Like, exactly. It is exactly true. But go back to your architecture scenario. The other challenge that you've got with forms is forms are dealing with data. A website's dealing with content and the content is owned by the marketing department. So it's constrained. There's still, it's complex, don't get me wrong. Okay. And the interactions are complex and imagery and branding and all of those. Been a marketing person, understand all of that.
The challenge with forms is forms aren't forms. Forms are business applications and the data is the critical part of it. And we often. You talked about getting requirements on a silver product. We often get into the organization, we go, excellent, you want us to pre populate this.
So what data do you have, what formats it and what APIs have you got for us? Okay. Oh, wait, you don't have any of that.
We are working on a project now to revamp legacy systems for a state division of child support.
And we're migrating them from a very old legacy tool. Okay. That they used to build this, that I was involved with in the Delrina days. Okay. And we're revamping it in adaptive forms. But one of the critical areas that we did before we even started on a form in the first place was rebuilt their service layer because they need to connect to a mainframe case management solution.
Well, we are not connecting to that directly, period. That's not happening. So you need a service layer. We needed to bring that up to spec and we needed a degree on the schema for the data that's coming across.
Now we can start connecting objects in an adaptive form or in an output form, connecting those together.
Right, Right. That's the critical component associated with it. Give you another example.
Large manufacturing organization went from a on premise account receivable system to a cloud based accounts receivable system. Wanted to revamp their invoice presentation, the invoice printing side of things, PDF, generation of invoices. Right.
We spent as much time on what has to go in the data schema, in the JSON schema to make an invoice because Oracle didn't have enough data to make an invoice. That sounds counterintuitive. They're the in, they're the accounts receivable system. Yes. But the tax software is another solution. Order management has all the serial numbers and the ship to addresses. Oracle doesn't have that. They only got the build to addresses. And there's a few other systems that have special components and customization.
So they had to build an entire middleware layer that then created the schema that had all that data merged into it that they could feed to us. So now that solution supports 65 countries, 25 different languages, including right to left languages. Right. 11 different invoice types and 15 different customer custom settings with a very, very small number of templates and fragments. We basically have 25 templates, one for each language and then custom objects to get asserted. We dynamically construct the document as we need it. We don't have a fixed template.
Okay. Right. You look at the data and go, well wait, you're Switzerland in German. Gotcha. I'll make a Swiss German layout for you and insert the data. There you are, you're done. Now what that means is they want to add a new country and English is okay in that country. We support English. A new country. It's a data schema change. That's it. They don't have to do anything. So that's the key. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about how we shift forms and change the way that you're doing it from the way that you did it 30 years ago.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Right. Now, I guess that's that's probably a decent segue to go from. What is the, what's the difference between somebody trying to do something relatively basic with forms? Because a lot of times when you think of a form, you're just thinking of fields typing and radio buttons and a submit button. And, and that's, that's kind of the most basic person's understanding of a form.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: But the difference between that use case and what are, what are the superpowers that a, that, that are, that are a discrete product that is also not, not, not something that is, is cheap or lightly purchased. What, what, what does that have and what is the difference between those two products?
[00:21:57] Speaker A: So there's a couple of different ones. One is the ability to do data integration. Okay. The, the, the capability of pre populating it and taking the data out and putting it in the appropriate place. Calling one or more APIs to get the data in or out. That's a key aspect to it. Second key aspect is the ability to do more with the document. So for example, in that invoicing example, one of the options that they can request is, is that they want multiple invoices merged into a single document.
Okay. That's a special use case. Now I have to produce all the pieces and then merge them all together. But I have to handle pagination and all of those kinds of things.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Merge other documents in. Take a scanned image of a delivery notice, add that, merge those kind of pieces. So that's the other key. But the other part to it is from a fillable perspective is intelligence in the filling capability. And the intelligence goes beyond just validation. The intelligence is, I'm not even going to ask you for information that doesn't apply to you. Okay. We've often gone to, I'll give you two examples.
You've often gone into doctor's offices and they've hand you a piece of paper to fill out a form and there's an entire section if you're pregnant. Okay, Right. If I'm doing that in an electronic capacity and you are identified as male, I'm not asking if you're pregnant. Okay? We're not asking for those things.
The whole scenario of I filled in my address once on the front page, why am I filling in my address on the third page and on the seventh page? Duplicating all across. So the ability to do that. Give an example, a commercial loan application, they deliberately made this as a downloadable fillable PDF. You need reader. And it's built that way because the, it's meant for Latin America and many of the, the corporations there were not necessarily want to connect to the Internet. Plus they had whole issues of data stored in different regions and all of those for the bank. So this they said, we're just going to give you a downloadable version. The downloadable version starts with one question, what country are you in? And you answer that question and then suddenly questions appear and based on your answers to those questions, more questions appear and more data entry appears. The end result is a document that you can print that is your commercial loan application that varies from 20 to 70 pages in length with attachments and inserts and all of that.
That's the difference between a simple Contact Us form on a website and you can do with forms. Now that is a well designed fillable downloadable form.
What we can do with AEM forms is put that online so that now you're capturing that in a way that makes sense for the user. But we're still only asking them what country? Now I'm gonna ask you. Now I don't have all the tabs for all the countries. I don't show you those until it's time for each one of those tabs to appear or each one of the pieces to appear. Then when you're done, even though you did it in a browser or you did it on a mobile device, or you did it across all of those devices because we can cross channel the things. Right now I'm going to produce a document that is the document of record that I can email you for a digital signature, get it back. I can pass in a workflow. I've got all the data. I can take the data after it's been approved and put it in the right place.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Something that's as flexible as that too. You're also talking about again to, to stray away from this definition of a form being a bunch of input fields. Yeah, you've got, you're, you're, you're, you're. Once again, like, like you said with the General Motors example, the person's already been browsing and you already know what he's been browsing. He already, maybe he's already logged in or something like that. You're not going to then go and make him fill out a form and said so which one are you interested? Do you like the LT? The Trail Boss, ZR2. This. You're like, I don't know, the red one, the one that I was looking at, the one I was looking you. If you already have that data, why, why would you make somebody fill out data that you Already have. Which, which that to me is, Is one of these, one of these things that should be framed and on the wall.
Please don't make me fill out something. The data that you already have.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Exactly. Okay. As I absolutely love it. Oh, here, you, you need to go fill this and okay. I've been with your organization. I'm not going to name names here. I've been with you, okay, for 20, 30, 40 years. I've been with you as a bank. I got a form and you're making me type my address in. You have the mortgage.
We know where I live, right. So don't make me fill out that information.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: And so.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Or the doctor's office example of these patient ingest forms of where you're like, yeah, okay, I just told you I'm here because I had a headache. I just told you, like, okay, now you're going to make me feel this. Oh, yeah. All the same data that you already have of me.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And we see that repeated all of the time. And it loops back to, to your original statement is the forms just don't get the attention that they deserve. They're critical business functions, okay? They're critical business functions and they have been for quite literally thousands of years.
All right? They're absolutely essential the operation of business.
But they aren't broke, so we'll just let them be, okay? And that's what happens. And they go, if, if.
So other example was talking to an organization and noticed when we were looking at the multiple forms, go, why are there different logos on the forms? Go, oh, well, we just let the different groups pick what logo they want to use. And marketing's okay with that. And they went, well, we didn't ask them.
Okay, so major insurance company was dealing with a rebranding scenario and had incorrect information on their forms. These are 21,500 forms, okay? 16,000 of them are fillable. They represent 38 million customer touch points annually. You don't think marketing cares about 38 million customer touch points?
[00:28:39] Speaker B: No.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, or, I mean, this is one of these things too, where you almost wish, like, you know how you do wish? Well, you know that senior execs look at your own website so that you know that that happens. Right? But, but what about signing up for stuff from scratch? Like there was a. So there's an airline. So I don't, I don't do a ton of international travel, but every so often when I do, I want to make sure I get miles for it. So I, I signed up for this one Airlines, major airlines loyalty program.
It was, it was a good thing that I was waiting for something. I think I was like on the train or something like that. So I had time, it took me 45 minutes to sign up for their loyalty program because it was just all this and back and forth and get another email and it comes back, well, good. Now, now, now why don't you tell me your number? I don't remember the 25 digit number that you gave me. Well, good. Well, you don't have to fill out this form to get your number and then you get your number back and then like, good. I, I really want the VP of marketing or VP Sales or whatever. Why don't you go try to sign up for your own loyalty program? Yeah, you're not going to be very loyal.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And yeah, there's, there's a lot of that in terms of what those experiences are. And it is interesting as to how, how much it does touch. Okay. Because data capture and data presentation are integral to the business processes. Right. It's not just a marketing activity. It's every single different activity that occurs. They're integral all the way through that. We still need to do that and we still need a document of record. There are compliance and regulatory things. We need a document that has a digital signature on it, maybe a physical signature that has that, that we can store in an appropriate place. Right. That we can handle. And that's what the forms need to do. And so an AEM forms infrastructure gives us mechanisms to handle all of those different pieces and handle different levels of workflows or pass it off to another workflow.
We've done integrations to enterprise systems to pega so that PEGA can call a form, get the information that it needs from the user, from the branch manager or the broker or whatever it is, grab the data out of it, and then pegas dealing with it and putting it into the mainframe system. So we're playing nice with all of the different pieces inside of a major enterprise infrastructure because that's what you have to do, that's what you, you recognize. Right? So we want to make sure that it has all of those edges ready to go and ready to be used.
But the challenge, and go back to the requirements commentary is, is people don't know all of those pieces and the people who own the forms might not know the business rules or worse, the IT folks don't know that the forms encode to the business rules. So they go, well, I can just, you know, Use Google Forms. That's for free. And it's like that's a survey form that doesn't do what this does and you can't, it doesn't have a language behind it that you can encode. Like there's JavaScript written all through there. That's doing things that are helping the person fill it out. What are you going to do with that?
Oh well, we don't need it. So you're just going to revert back decades. Well done you. Right, right. So that's, that's part of the challenge again, the no respect scenario.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, it's true. But I guess that too, that, I mean part of it I think comes down to also because it, because it's both ends. A lot of, A lot of the squeaky wheel on the Adobe side is, is, is with, was, was with the flashy things. And so yeah, the, the, the newer products are very well explained and then end up, end up getting a lot of showtime by, by consultants like, like us who end up doing a lot of show and tells with customers. Like, here's how you do this. Here's how edge delivery works. Here's. Here's the difference between doing it the old component style, the new theater. So there's a lot of understanding that's out there in terms of diagrams and what are the products consist of and what can you buy and where can you plug it in and so forth. There's not the same amount when it comes to forms.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: No, there's not. And part of it is because of the legacy of where it came from and the way that existing customers use it. Okay.
Existing customers who do document generation that, that organization it does. Doc. We have a bank that produces automobile loan or automobile financing packages. Okay, fantastic solution works great. They're happy.
The, when you go back in and you talk to them about adaptive forms, they go, that's a different group, that's somebody else. I don't, I don't do that well. Yeah, but you have am. You could do it. I, but I don't, I don't have that need.
What they, what the Adobe as an organization is doing from a forms perspective though is creating a, let's call it a tighter integration, a tighter alignment with the entire AEM stack, specifically with sites. And one of the things that they showed. And again this is a summit session. Okay. People get this online and it was done by the forms business unit and they told a really good story that linked together how you can tie AEM Forms and edge delivery into the site's experience.
So they try to create that end to end story of interaction throughout the process and of the production of a solid document post acquisition and the kind of interesting things that you can do with the AEM of Forms as a cloud service. All right, and what they're adding and the capabilities that they're adding to it, and they're adding some very interesting capabilities to that.
One of the things that they're doing is adding AI based form filling, natural language processing to allow for form filling. Okay. And this works on edge delivery. One of the things that we're doing is we're taking that concept and applying it to, applying it to legacy pieces.
So older forms technologies, we can still apply that kind of natural language processing, that kind of. I want to, I want to be walked through filling out the form. I don't want to see the form kind of a scenario. Right, right. So Adobe's adding that, we're adding that, that's giving a wide range of different options for customers. The other thing they're adding in is AI based design assistance so that you can go in and go, I need a form to do this kind of thing. Okay, here's an outline of a form I built what you need for it. Now you can add pieces to it. So it gives you a foundation in the same way any of the AI chat tools would give you an assistance in writing a document. They're not going to do the document for you, but they're going to give a foundation. They're going to give you a solid base that you can then go and write for. And that's where the, the, the Adobe team is trying to do. The other thing that they're doing that's really interesting is tying forms in, in a much tighter way to other parts of the entire stack. And one of the areas we're really excited about is the integration with Workfront.
Workfront has some really powerful, what we'll call workflow, they call them scenarios. Okay. But the ability to go, okay, I've got a document that needs this review and this review and then I need it sent and put in marketo and these kinds of things. Well, by tying forms into that, suddenly now it's, now I can send a form for review, now I can do that. And I've got the Workfront interface which we can spend out beyond marketing, beyond a project management management scenario, into a more operational scenario. So it's a really interesting tie in and we're doing some, it's, it's early days for that now, but we're Doing some investigation on that because one of the challenges from an AEM Forms and a workflow, and the complexity of workflow. We talked about data integration and rest APIs. Well, that's the moment you talk about JSON and REST and that you're talking coding.
Workfront gives users who don't have the coding skills the ability to map out a workflow. If we can tie the forms to that now suddenly we've got a mechanism of. I don't have to go think about how I do that. I can just feed it, the data into it. Again, early days on that. But very, very exciting stuff.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: It's early. Yeah, it is early days. But, but, but the, the, the draw is really there because if you look at what you're coming from, because forms that like the product that you initially worked on, that moved into Lifecycle, that moved into being called AEM Forms, I mean it really was just made me from my operations background. I mean supporting that as a, as a server was a challenge because that thing loved to break.
Because it's really just literally a server packaged up and shoved inside of AEM and with a whole bunch of other things built onto it. And the way it was licensed also generally meant it was always under provisioned.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Because you had people who like, oh, I'm only paying for, I only have enough money for two CPUs. That's all I'm giving it is two CPUs. And so, so it's, it's gonna struggle. It's gonna be on the struggle bus if it's getting anything more than a couple forms an hour. Yeah, but, but that. Moving, moving. So, but as a result it's, it's sitting there out there in and amongst am. So what, what, what do you have to plug it in workflow wise? You, you've got AM's workflow engine, which. Yeah, AM has an immensely powerful workflow engine, but it's not really terribly accessible to the non technical user. Correct, correct. The moving away from that into the workfront paradigm where you've got. Okay, good. I'm super intelligent. I'm not, I'm not a coder, but I know about my business, I know everything about my business. I know my processes, I know all that stuff.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: That is, that is our hope. Yes.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: That gives that user access to that.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that is our hope. We're running some experiments internally to determine how we can use that. Early signs. And it's early, but early signs are very, very promising.
Okay.
Being able to integrate those pieces and we think. And the other Thing that that does is one of the challenges from a, an AEM forms perspective is even though the workflows, the amount of tracking, audit rollback, okay, status, all of that kind of stuff tends to need to be custom built. Okay. And that's just an extra cost, whereas Workfront provides all of that. So if we can use that, leverage that, so that you can know where the form is in the process, then that's going to be more interesting for us. So again, early days on that, but there definitely is a lot of those kinds of activities are going on, tying it into other things and tying. Now one of the challenges that we've got is that the focus of all of these new enhancements is the cloud service. And the cloud service is a great place to be and it's where you should target, except when you can't.
And there are circumstances that we have where Adobe Managed Services is a more appropriate environment, usually around regulatory and compliance scenarios because it is much more controllable from a security and compliance perspective.
And you know, it comes for government agencies, it comes FedRAMP approved.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: So that makes it a better target for that.
But it only gets the flow down, okay. Of some of the features. And if you're running in an on premise scenario or a private cloud scenario because you want that total level of security or you have to have it married next to the other device, the other servers and applications, then you're farther down the chain of feature sets and some feature sets will not flow down and some features don't make any sense down there. Some feature sets are not going to flow down.
So that's part of what we see in a lot of the circumstances is trying to identify for organizations what is the appropriate environment for you, what's the best environment. How do we figure that out based on all the things that you need to do. Right. And then because when you do that in a site scenario, okay, that's pretty straightforward is I, I need security, so I'll go ams, I, I want flexibility and elasticity, so I'll go cloud service. But it's all, it's all self contained.
There might be some other integrations, but they're very clean integrations.
A lot of forms integrations are very messy. Okay, right. Especially the older ones. So that's a challenge in how do we get your system that is on prem.
Where is it going in the cloud? Well, can't it go with the AEM environment? Well, maybe, okay, that's where you're putting it.
But it really should go in its own server and then you've got to do a connection. And now we're VPN circling it. Oauthing, what are we doing? How are we doing that? So there's a whole set of conversations that we want to have with organizations around, okay, what does your architecture look like? And generally we handle this and the data issues and the requirements issues and all of those is let's lay out a roadmap. Let's lay out a roadmap for you and say, here's where you are, here's where you want to be.
What are steps that we can put in place along the way that are going to move you to where you want to be that are gaining value? So you're seeing value now. We can go away and work for 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36 months to do all of this, but if we're just working for, you know, two years and you're a year in and everybody starts questioning what's going on because you haven't seen anything. So we want to build a roadmap that says how do you start seeing things, seeing value as they're seeing it? And there's different ways we can do that.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: Which is, which is, which can be a challenge. And this is, this is, this does come down to comms a lot of the, a lot of the time. Because if you're taking something like for example, let's say you've, you have an organization that does leverage a lot of complicated forms, but they are really looking forward to their primary public facing sites being on something like edge delivery.
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: And so if you're like, okay, well we've got critical forms.
Some of them might be complicated, some of them might require pre fill, Some of them might require pre fill from something that currently is on premise.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:43:42] Speaker B: Like you have one of these where. Yes, we have all of our stuff on premise. There's an on premise database, there's an on premise this and that and there's a, some weird service that was written in 1993 that we're still using and then. Yeah, so all that stuff and yes, but can you make it work on edge delivery? You have to be measured in your, in your responses, but also, you know, thoughtful of like good. Well, how can you prepare them for like good. So you know, there's some, there's some CSO type, chief security officer type communications that we're going to have to say like, just so you know, this database is going to have a service layer in front of it and it's going to get open, it's going to, going to be on the Internet.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: So there is, there, there's that part to it. The other part is setting edge delivery expectations. Because if edge delivery is important, then the, the latency issues. Okay. The speed of presentation is a critical part and part of the challenge with a lot of forms and to an extent dynamic websites is that the caching associated with that just doesn't work. Okay. An on demand request based on the user that logged in.
No, we're not allowed to cache that user information across sessions they logged out. No, we're not allowed to cache that data. So that means I have to make that call. Every time they log in and they open up a form and the door presented, I got to go get their address and pull it up. Okay, that's fine, we can do that.
But now the latency of your backend system is destroying your lighthouse scores.
Okay, that's not an edge delivery or form problem. But how do you explain that to a marketing IT person who is used to, well, push the content closer to me. You're not allowed to. Okay. Or architecturally, technically getting that database moved closer to the environment or put inside the edge delivery environment, that's going to be a real technological challenge associated with it. Or it's in a mainframe. What, what am I going to do? Okay, no, so there, there's not just the, the expectation setting around security and what you're going to do associated with this. There's an expectation setting around.
This is doing more than just pushing content.
Now if they're simple, straightforward, no pre population data goes back.
Sure, edge delivery is fantastic and deliver a very high speed experience. Right. But use the right tool for the job. If edge delivery, if speed is important, then minimize what your requirements are associated with that so that they fit within edge delivery. Oh no, I need to do all these business requirements. Then remove the edge delivery requirements to ensure that you can deliver it appropriately. Right. And people are okay with that. Now I'm not saying, you know, you got to wait 30 seconds for the display. No, we want to get them down. Right. But we have these performance conversations with customers all the time on non edge delivery scenarios where they're going, well, hold on, this form is taking, you know, 500 milliseconds to display and we need it displaying in 200 milliseconds. And we go, the form itself is displaying in 100 milliseconds.
The API you provided is taking the rest of the time. Okay. We don't see a way of compensating for that. So they're going to have to wait a second. It's just what they're going to have to do. Okay, that's going to be the experience, right?
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Or be willing to rethink how some of these forms work.
Because in some cases they say, good, well, here's the form. So it's, we signing up and we, we're, we're getting people to sign up for an on premise event. We track these on premise events in this thing over here. And so you need to be able to get the attendance levels from this thing and bring it in.
But the site, the form has to come up in this amount of time. And you're like, yeah, it's not going to work like that. So yeah, let's actually work out a way that the. Because that's the other thing too. And I read a really nice explanation about this really recently. I'd love to be able to credit the author, but it was talking about the idea of performance being not just a, like you're a lighthouse score, which is setting a threshold for performance. And you're like, okay, well here it's got to be 100, 100 all the time, right? So you have that bar, right? And then you have the bar of like what, at what point does the customer think oh, this is this, this loaded really nicely for me. Right?
[00:48:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: And then that, that, that these aren't bars. That is actually basically providing a window of performance, of acceptable performance. Like in there. If you can get, if you can get your form done in there and, and it's loading well for, for the person, no matter if they're on a mobile device or, or whatever. Because you know, obviously like we're saying you, the user experience on a form is it has to be good.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: But there's another piece to that, there's a third one is at what point will they abandon. Okay.
And so the trade off is, is that the abandonment rate also depends on the value of the four.
Right? So it's the value of the transaction associated with it. If I'm going in, and your Amazon example is if I'm going in and I click, I want to buy it and I get to the cart and I've got, you know, five second delay on getting it up, I'm going, I'll come back later. Okay, right. Because it's not there. But if I'm filling out a change of address form, I might wait a little longer to ensure that that got through properly, all of those kinds of things. So it really depends on the value Associated with that particular transaction. Associated with it. But the key is, what you said before is let's rethink, let's rearchitect it. So for example, one of the things that we try to do on the fillable browser based adaptive forms is make them as dynamic and flexible as possible. We want to make it so that the organization's maintenance is, is as reduced as possible once they build the form. So one of the things that we like to do is we like to have a pre population of dynamic content that gets loaded into drop down lists. Okay. Now a state list is, that's a pretty static list and it's pretty obvious when you, you change it had states.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: In a little while.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: Exactly. Okay. But other lists might be way more dynamic associated with it. We're doing work for a wealth management company and so they preload a prey of funds that can be added to different products associated with it so that the search is lightning fast because it's all inside, it's all cached. Okay. We could have made that a call back, but that would mean the search was slow. But the trade off there is the preload is slow because we're loading literally thousands of fund records in. Okay. Right. And so when we load those in, that takes more time. So it's a trade off as to where you want to go with that. And either one is perfectly acceptable. It's really just a question of where do you want that experience to occur. You got to take some time somewhere to do these things. Okay. Where do you want to take that? And what's your architecture look like? Where is it, how is it situated so that we can reduce latency across the entire architecture? Right.
[00:51:04] Speaker B: And how, and how critical is it for the initial parts of the form fill?
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: That's another bit because if you have somebody who's filling out a form and everything, everything is down below. They're, they're, they're, they're reading, they're reading everything. They don't necessarily need to. All that data could be populating underneath while. And going back and forth to an on premise server or something like that.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: Of doing it.
[00:51:27] Speaker A: Exactly. There's different ways of mitigating it and, and thinking through that process of how we want to do that.
And that all comes back to that, you know, effective design and balancing all of the different trade offs, trying to deal with what we're actually trying to accomplish.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
Well, good. Well, we're, we're coming up on an hour here. Is there, so is there anything else that you like if you, we're going into something, going into a customer, or even reevaluating ones that you've already done, is there anything that you would want people to make sure they're thinking of while thinking of a, their own forms needs? That is a, things like we were talking about things that you wished or that you have printed on your wall. Like what would you, what would you wish were printed on their wall before, before going in and engaging you.
[00:52:18] Speaker A: The, the, well, the phrase that we use is, what we want to talk about is next generation forms. What we want organizations to do is to understand that by and large they're doing things the way they were done 10, 20, even 30, 40 years ago. Okay, yeah, you're electronic, but we're really not taking advantage of technology and the expectations for your, your employees, for your users, for your citizens and constituents, it's all changed completely. And intellectually, they know that. What we want to do is have them thinking, I can do better with my forms. All right, then the question is, is okay, let's work out a plan that meets what you need to accomplish in the short term and with your budgets and all of those kinds of things, but that you can do better. And what does better look like for you? It's unique to each organization. But coming to us and saying, I can do better with my forms, help me figure out what better looks like for me. What does good look like for me? Because there's a lot of stuff we've talked about, a lot of different pieces. It's, you know, is changing the eight and a half by 11 paradigm, breaking that, doing output way more efficiently, saving time and money on the main, maintenance of those kinds of things, using adaptive form so that I can get into a browser, right? So that I can get those kind of things and still be compliant, regulatory compliance, still have a document come out.
You know, where do digital signatures fit in?
Think about how you can do better. Okay, that's what we want to talk about. What does next generation look like for, for your organization? And that's what we want to talk to them about and figure out what a plan plan looks like for them.
[00:54:05] Speaker B: Awesome.
Well, great. Well good. Well, thank you so much for, for this, for this full convo. I, I, I have been, I've been waiting to talk to somebody in detail about forms online for some time and I'm, I'm glad I happened to run into you at Adobe Summit and I hope folks got something out of this and, and yeah, so do I.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: An absolute pleasure from my side as you can tell I'm always interested in talking about forms.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. All right, good. Well, thank you so much, Eric. We'll end up here. Thank you.
