Automating IT Processes using cmwforms

Background

Developing, delivering and supporting an IT system is a complex activity which involves many processes and activities.  Some of these can be classified as planning, management and governance type activities and others can be classified as technical development and test activities.

cmwforms provides an extensive set of applications that can be used to automate key project planning, management and governance processes.  These application integrate together and help bridge the gap between the customer, IT department, solution developer and service provider.

Process Support

cmwforms includes a substantial number of applications that can be used to support and automate key project management and governance processes.  These applications are ready to use with minimal development effort and can support small as well as large projects.

Where necessary you can create additional applications and you can also customise and modify the standard cmwforms applications.  cmwforms application development does not require any programming or database design skills.

Supporting in-house development effort

cmwforms can be used to support organisations that design and develop applications in-house.  In this scenario cmwforms would be made available across the corporate LAN and all departments can manage their processes and collaborate with total ease.

Supporting outsourced development effort

Many organisations have moved away from the traditional in-house development model to a model where the bulk of IT development is outsourced. 

cmwforms is well suited to these environments by providing support for key processes that are needed to manage and monitor external suppliers and also providing a web based implementation that can be used by all parties, in-house and outsourced.

CMW workspace and security features can allow you to collaborate with several suppliers with total ease.  Also you can choose to operate with all your suppliers using a single open workspace or you can separate and segregate your suppliers into independent workspaces.

Easy to use

cmwforms is exceptionally easy to use and administer.  A key design criteria for cmwforms is that it must be usable by business users and IT experts without the need for formal training. 

All the applications have the same look and feel and are identical in terms of usability and commands. Creating records, editing records, navigating, filtering, relating, linking, transforming, cloning, searching, printing, exporting and importing records is identical in all tools.  Once you have used one tool, you can use all the rest.

Most other vendors will find it very difficult to provide the same level of consistency across their applications, especially if these were developed by different vendors and then acquired and marketed as a single suite of applications.

Easy to administer

cmwforms requires minimal administration.  Once the CMW Server is installed the only central administration work needed is to register users and workspaces.  Both tasks require zero IT experience and can be performed with total ease.

Easy to configure

Creating and modifying cmwforms applications is a very simple process which requires no IT, database or programming skills. Any user with limited IT knowledge will be able to create a new application with total ease.

To create an application the user only needs to do the following:

1. Create a blank form.
2. Add to this the required fields.
3. Specify the order in which the fields are to be displayed.
4. If the application requires a process workflow then the user has to specify the states and their order.

Once the above is complete cmwforms will automatically provide the following:

1. An application folder in the workspace.
2. Access to all standard commands which include (edit, open, copy, clone, transform, print, import, export, filter, link, relate, ... etc.

Applications can be modified once they have been used without the need to worry about historical data. Applications can be added/removed and fields can be add/removed with total ease.

cmwforms was designed to be supported and administered by a user with limited IT experience.  You do not need to employ a programmer or database expert to create a cmwforms application.

cmwforms is a web based application and can therefore be made available to all parties (customer, IT department, solution developer and service provider) with total ease.