Enterprises are more and more relying on the possibilities provided by the Internet for their external and internal processes. Self-service customer portals are more and more prevalent, and their employees use intranet portals to communicate with each other. Online surveys form an important element of processes, and their use provides cost effectiveness in several areas for the enterprise and convenience for the user. They might play an important role in supporting standardized processes.

WebForms consists of two main elements. The survey module is accessible in an Internet and intranet pop-up window. The sites can be published for universal access, and customized access might be provided to certain individuals. The administrative module is accessible in the company only, on its intranet. The form administrators can use this for processing incoming information. WebForms provides content for the site and processes the filled-out forms, and saves the data in an Oracle database.


Roles and rights
There are several separate roles available in the tool. Those who fill the form would see and fill the finalized surveys. The form administrator creates and manages the surveys, a viewer might have a look at the results, and the administrator configures the application settings. Groups can be defined when creating forms, which might be – for example – certain departments of the company. All roles are available in the groups.
No registration is required for users coming through the Internet to fill the survey; if they want to be contacted, they can provide their contact information, which will be saved in the database. Filtering automatic mass filling of surveys is aided by a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)-technology. It requires the user to type in a series of characters visible in a distorted form, which validates human (and not computer) use.
Users and administrators coming through the intranet are authenticated, i.e. preliminary registration is required.

Operations and processes
Form administrations might execute the following basic operations: create, activate, deactivate, delete, copy. A preview of the survey is available when editing, and they can return to the editor or finalize the changes after the preview. The form can be saved as draft and the later on continued.
The Send function allows the administrators to send the surveys to certain individuals, setting an expiration time. Before the survey expires, the user will get a notification from the system. A tracking function is available for surveys sent.

Creating forms
Several layouts and styles can be defined in the editing interface when creating the form, and new style sheets might be added to the existing ones.
All the usual form elements can be used when creating a survey – eg. single- or multiple-line fields of custom size without content restrictions, combo box, radio button, checkbox, point distributing or scaling question, list allowing for multiple choices. Comments might be added to the answer by using a tooltip, and the words entered will become free-text metadata that can be searched. The forms contain a privacy policy declaration, appearing in a pop-up window that has to be accepted before the form might be filled.
Visibility can be defined for each field when editing, and otherwise hidden contact fields appear on the form when choosing the process support option.

Checking entries
Several verification functions might be running when the survey is filled. Entry and mandatory field verifications are such functions. The tool checks text fields using regular expressions, and notifies the user if invalid values were entered. A preliminary filter solution allows for defining criteria questions on the first page of the form, and the answers provided for these questions determine the questions appearing on the second pages. The number of correct answers required for advancing to the next page can also be set here. This function might be useful for product offerings. The system uses several filters (Javascript, SQL, HQL) for filtering malicious data.

Orientation
Orientation of form administrators is assisted by various filters. A pre-filtering menu element can be selected in the menu system, and additional search or filtering conditions can be added to the list of results generated. In addition to content searching, it can be filtered for metadata as well.
Further conditions can be defined in the list of filled-out surveys, like date or correct answer. Selecting the latter will display the form where the number of correct answers reached the defined minimum.
Full or shortened content of the lists of hits can be exported in CSV format.