XForms: Orbeon vs. Lotus Forms

A representative from IBM is coming to Silver Spring tomorrow to give a sales pitch on IBM Lotus Forms. The XML DR working group is considering Lotus Forms as a solution to the problem of: How to we generate an XML input form from a metadata specification and present it to the user?

The W3C XForm specification seems to be exactly what our working group has been looking for to solve this ongoing problem (that has basically stopped us in our tracks). The spec is, however, young and we would like some sort of finished product to make this system operational. Lotus Forms and Orbeon are the two products that we’ve found. Orbeon is entirely open source, and they sell support (if that’s something we need) which leaves me wondering what the value of IBM will be. Let’s prep for the meeting so that we can ask the sale representative informed questions.

Easy (semantic) Questions

• How are forms built and deployed? Is it just a simple Form file that we can e-mail to the field and tell them to plop it in a certain directory?
• Is there an offline mode for the forms? Yes, Lotus Forms Viewer. What value does Lotus Forms Viewer add? What would be the advantages over something like the Firefox XForms extension?
• Is Lotus Forms servable from any standard web server or is the Lotus server really required?
• Tell us more about the digital signatures which the forms support
• I assume that data is stored and transmitted as an XML document? Is there support for starting with an existing XML schema and designing the form around that? We need to be able to check our schemas against existing metadata standards.
• Do any of your developers of this product sit on the W3C Forms working group?

• How is XForms different from Orbeon

Our Requirements

• Must have an off-line mode (survey vessel may or may not have an Internet connection
• We must have access to the data at all stages of the pipeline (there aren't really that many stages... I guess we just want access to the schemas and to the XML output... are there any other stages?)
• Running on a standard web browser is ideal

Licensing

• Certain other (remaining nameless) software vendors have held us hostage to their overly restrictive liscensing schemes.
• We would need clients on almost every machine in the field, branches and office (HSD). That's a lot. To save on cost could we just deploy forms using a standard web browser and buy Lotus Forms builder for the metadata managers to use in the office? That would only be a couple of people.
• If we do need to use a Lotus Forms client, what would the liscensing arrangments be?

What would we get for the money that we put towards buying software, if we went with Orbeon, where we wouldn’t have to pay for software… we could put all funding into support and development.