Form Master

Form Name

The Form Name is a language-neutral name for the forms.

Form Group

The Form Group will determine which section the form belongs to.  It gives you the ability to organize eForms in a way that makes the most sense for your business.  Some form groups exist by default through template forms that ProcessMetric provides for you.  You can create your own custom form groups to best fit your individual needs.  For instance, if the group “Accounting” is too generic and you need a form group for “Accounts Payable” and “Accounts Receivable,” you can create your own custom eForm groups.

eForm groups also give you the ability to publish groups of eForms to  your business partners.  For instance, if your company has a dealer network and you want to publish customer service-oriented eForms for your dealers to use, create a new form group with the appropriate visibility settings and put your forms into that group.  Click “Form Groups” link to edit form groups.

Form Description

the eForm description is where you can put language-specific titles to your eForms.  Depending on the user’s language preference, it will show the description in their native language.  Set the languages the form will support on the languages link on the eForm’s action menu.

Version

The form version is how you control the creation and release of your forms.  Each time you create a new version of a form by clicking on the “New Version” link on the left.  The version will auto increment and you don’t need to worry about changing this value.  However, you WILL want to know the version you are working on when you are testing your forms and when it comes time to release the form to your users.

Release Status

An eForm can have three release statuses: Testing, Released, Obsolete.    These three statuses will control the life cycle of each version of a form.

Testing:  

When you initially 1) create a new eForm, 2) create a new version of a form, or 3) “Add” a template, the eForm will be in a testing status.  An eForm in the Testing status will only be available to the form administrators (See User Roles) and the company administrators (See Settings -> User Settings)

Released:  

After testing the eform in Testing status, change the eForm’s status to Released.  eForms in a Released status will be avilable to users who are allowed to create the form based on the “Limit New Form To” setting.  These users will see the eForm as an available form to create when they click “New eForm” on the my Forms tab.

Obsolete:  

Setting a form to the Obsolete status effectively deletes that version of the eForm.   It will disappear from the list of Company Forms.  If the eForm is a template form provided by ProcessMetric, it will go back to a Template status and can be re-added as a company form.  NOTE:  after you save a form with the status set to Obsolete, you have one last chance to recover the form.  Before clicking Company Forms or clicking on another ProcessMetric page, you can change the status and re-save the form.

Limit ‘new eForm’ to

This option will determine which users can create a new instance of an eForm by clicking the “New eForm” button on the my eForms tab.  There are three possible setting for this option: Company, Form Creators, and Public

Company:

The eForm is available to all users in your company.  The Release Status must be set to “Released” to be visible to company users.

Form Creators:

Form creators are users who are assigned to a Form Role of either “Approver” or “Form Creator.”  Like the Company option, the Release Status must be set to “Released” to be visible to Form Creators.

Public: 

Public forms are available to be created with a special link that does not require a user to be authenticated to ProcessMetric.  The user who creates one of these forms is considered anonymous by the system.  Examples of why you would you use this are forms you may want to put on your website for user feedback or requests for information where you don’t need the user to be a member of ProcessMetric.  As an example, when you create a user account on ProcessMetric, the registration process is actually an eForm set to Public.

Assign-to on create

When an eForm is created, by default it is immediately assigned to the eForm creator.  ProcessMetric eForms ALWAYS have an individual user to whom the form is assigned.  You can override the user whom the form is assigned to with this option if you always want the eForm to go to a specific person.  For instance, when you submit an eForm like “Bug Report,” “Customer Service Request,” or “Suggestion Box” eForms to ProcessMetric, this option is set to a specific persion at ProcessMetric whose job it is to handle your customer service request.

Form instances visible to

This option will determine who can see the eForm on the my eForms after an instance of an eForm has been created. There are four options that control this visibility.

Form Users:

By default, the visibility of ProcessMetric eForms is limited to the form creator, users who have an approval role, and all users (internal to or external) to whom the form has been assigned or carbon-copied on the form’s Forward page.  

Form Users and a Specific Department: 

Some forms should be visible to a specific department. For instance, if the form is a customer service form and all customer service representatives should be able to work on the form, choose this option.  If the customer service representative to whom the form is assigned is out of the office, then all other people in that department can get to the form by unchecking the “Assigned to Me” filter on the my eForms page.

Form Users and form Creator’s Department:

Similar to the previous section, there are forms that should be visible to all users within the form creator’s department.  For example, a company’s security policy might require all departments to conduct a quarterly security audit.  ProcessMetric can be used to provide evidence that each department successfully completes the audit.  The department manager could create an instance of the security audit eForm, and all employees within that department can access and participate without the eForm being specifically assigned to them.  Other departments’ audit documents will not be accessible to this department’s users.

Form Users and Creator’s Company:

This option opens visibility to each instance of an eForm to all users of the eForm’s company.

Read Only on Open

To prevent inadvertent editing of an eForm, this option will cause all input fields of an eForm to be read-only when the eForm is viewed.  It will also enable an “Edit” action menu option when the eForm is in a Read-Only state.  Of course all other field- and group-level security settings will be enforced once the eForm is put into an editable state.