Development and integration of BOCC E-forms with the existing content management system (CMS) and back office systems for the West Oxfordshire District Council (WODC) website.

http://www.westoxon.gov.uk/
The E-forms back-end system is not available publicly.

		Typical E-form	Creating an E-form	Online services

BOCC offered its E-forms(1) product to WODC(2) as a solution to provide web-based forms as part of the requirements to meet Government(3) targets to access their services online by the end of 2005. BOCC created a graphical interface design for the E-forms, which complimented the new redesign for the website. The E-forms also meet the required accessibility standard of double-A conformance for the W3C web accessibility initiative (WAI)(4) when applied to suitable CMS web pages.

The E-forms module was fully integrated with the existing Content Management System (CMS)(5), (which was also developed by BOCC) and other back-office systems at WODC. E-forms has been integrated in the following multiple ways:

• The gazetteer address search passes forward property reference numbers to e-forms pre-populating data fields
• E-forms is embedded within the WODC content management system (CMS) page design
• Some E-forms, which require a payment, pass the user seamlessly through to the online payments system provided by BOCC
• E-forms data are replicated into WODC's customer relationship management (CRM) system

In addition E-forms data relating to waste services, such as missed collections or purchase of new bins, are passed directly onto the cleaning services contractor without manual intervention.

Each form submission is tagged with a unique reference number. The number is automatically included on the thank-you page after a form has been submitted.

The E-forms module has a secure web-based administration and form-building tool, which allows WODC users to create and edit the forms and to analyse and report on responses in real-time. Access to the administrative functionality is granted on a user-by-user basis.

The E-forms are simple enough to allow non-technical users to create the forms and yet robust enough to allow the creation of multiple page forms utilising advanced research techniques such as piping, branching and matrix questions.

The forms that can be created by WODC users can be extremely simple asking for an email address and comments or can be multiple pages with lots of questions, only some of which requiring a response.

Free sample forms were provided which can be copied and then edited as required. Forms already created on the website can also be copied and edited as required so it is extremely easy to make a form similar to another one.

A library of common questions is included. Questions can be selected from the library and then modified as required. Forms can be previewed as they are being built and published only when they are complete. As the e-forms are maintained on a real-time basis, it means that WODC can quickly make e-forms available, make changes to existing forms, activate and deactivate them.

Simple reporting is available from within the administrative interface which includes both graphical and text-based reporting.

The E-forms are created and maintained as part of the web-based content management system developed by BOCC.

Dynamic content management, graph creation, administration and server side processing are undertaken using Macromedia ColdFusion. Surveys and survey data is stored in a Microsoft SQL server database. Pages and E-forms sent to web browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(6) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(7) compliant.

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