In the first part of our seminar we discussed some topics that forms customers want to change today.
These changes are mostly focussed on the island most forms applications and teams are working on today, such as:
- 1) Internal services that are provided within the enterprise that could uplift the provided functionality to the end users.
E.g. Order-information that is provided via a webservice of the existing legacy application. This information can be provided to the back-end and forms interface to have real time information provided to the accountancy-department that is using the forms app.
- 2) External services that are provided by partners that could uplift the provided functionality to the customers and the business users.
E.g. a good example of the ROI is explained in the ZLM Case Study.
- 3) Existing pl/sql functionality that can be offered as a service to enterprise applications or external partners.
E.g. the forms application handles the allocation of consultants of iAdvise. To be able to provide customers a better service we could offer the business unit managers, pre-sales and sales a real-time view on the whereabouts (no we don’t play tennis ;o) ) of the consultants. In other words, a customer is facing production problems and needs support asap, the sales person looks up which consultants are nereby the customers with the needed skills. Given the coordinates the sales-person can then call the consultant and give the customer a much better service without needing to cross to many channels to get the necessary information.
4) Get on the fusion track and let your forms application talk to you jee, adf, apex, custom made application.
You want to integrate new functionality which is provided through ajax, java server faces, event driven architecture, … to improve look and feel and to let end users profit from the added value such as asynchronous event handling, JavaScript integration, …
In other words when you start thinking about improvements you could make to your existing forms application, the ROI mostly is very obvious.
The investments made in human capital, architecture and infrastructure are protected whilst enabling integration of new technologies and improving your existing skill set and investments.
What I would like to know from other customers, developers, end-users, …:
Is anybody facing integration/modernization issues today within their Forms Apps that can’t be addressed using one of the following scenario’s: modernization, integration, upgrade to 10g/11g?
If so, please provide us this information so we can discuss the different scenario’s, aspects that are applicable to your specific case.
