Is Adobe targeting Microsoft's InfoPath?
InternetNews | at | by Mike
The integration of XML with forms technologies holds strong potential for the enterprise, especially in industries like insurance and health care which make heavy use of forms. The emerging technologies promise significant increases in both efficiency and accuracy, as they allow organizations to capture data directly from forms and feed it into backend databases, where business processes can be applied to it to automate workflow.
Microsoft committed to capturing the nascent market early on and will deliver a core application, dubbed InfoPath, with the Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition, slated for release this summer. Now Adobe Systems has thrown its hat into the ring, unveiling plans to develop new form design software that will allow users to deploy forms in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) or in an XML Data Package (XDP) as desired.