Efficient Forums

Before you even start reading this post, I want you to know that it is a lot of sizzle and not much steak. And, I am okay with that because I am excited. It’s that simple.

If you have read my blog in the past, you probably figured out I like what we do at Efficient Forms (if not feel free to contact me at 303.785.8638). One of the coolest parts of my job is getting to see the diverse ways the Transaction Origination Platform (TOP) is being deployed. Four years ago, I could not have imagined a fraction of the potential uses for TOP.

We regularly have various entities (that find us from typically unlikely connections) present new and exciting uses of TOP that I had no clue would be such an exact fit. The really fascinating thing for me is TOP-created Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs) will potentially save lives and may drastically improve the lives of families in need, along with helping students apply to college and other socially responsible things. This makes us feel good, even though these CEVA uses are typically not our ideas. We just enable them.

An excellent research report on Content Enabled Vertical Applications was conducted by Gartner.

“Gartner believes that CEVAs and line-of-business offerings are the future for most traditional ECM vendors. CEVAs are used when business processes are driven by documents, forms and other content (applying for a mortgage is one example). Although enterprises have asked for this for years, and vendors have responded with standard products and lots of professional services, a transformation has occurred with more demand and focus being placed on repeatable solutions. When well-thought-out policies, information architecture and process management are put in place beforehand, CEVAs can deliver process improvements not only in terms of speed but also in terms of accountability and rigor.”

Originally, our motives were purely capitalistic. And while that is still a focus, it still amazes me to realize that the social benefits we can help many entities attain with TOP. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, our goal was to create “Turbo Tax®” for everything else, and what evolved was TOP, a CEVA creation machine that can produce socially responsible solutions and still provide us with the margins we look for.

So, who will come up with the most creative and socially beneficial use of TOP over the next year? Check back for regular updates, and who knows, we might even come up with Dave’s TOP 10 CEVAs list.

I will normally not use this blog to directly tout Efficient Forms TOP (Transaction Origination Platform), at least not without first trying to make the shameless promotion a bit disguised in a political or pressing issue of the day (as in pretty much the last 4 articles).

But this post is simply a shameless plug… for good reason though!

New Release

Earlier this week I was excited to see the new release of our TOP solution roll into live customer sites without a hitch and on schedule. Both without a hitch and on schedule are about as rare for small or a large software companyies as a no-hitter is in baseball.

Even though the enormous amount of new features will not be realized by all our customers immediately, all will be impressed with the new looks, simpler workflow and new help functionality which will be hard to miss. Under the covers is where a lot of the cool features to TOP reside.

This new release has dramatically enhanced a domain expert’s (or business analyst’s) ability to configure and customize vocabulary, actions and workflow for their TOP powered CEVA (Content Enabled Vertical Application). For me the new release gives Efficient Forms’ TOP even more flexibility and capabilities as Efficient Forms continues to launch TOP CEVAs into more and more diverse industries, solving and automating difficult transaction origination and collaboration issues for corporations, government entities, and entire industries.

TOP’s ability to smoothly hand-off a completed transaction or event to service provider’s ECM (Enterprise Content Management) of choice is also an exciting capability the TOP powered CEVA offering brings to our customers and the ECM industry. TOP gives ECM players (like IBM, EMC, Xerox, Oracle and others) an impressive efficient alternative to high paid professional services custom developers, as their customers continue to demand more and more CEVAs specific to their needs.

Yes, I could go on and on but I won’t. If you want to learn more about TOP check out our web site and or give us a call. That’s it — I am done with the shameless plug without a disguise (for now…).

For more information on Enterprise Content Management see the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2007 report