Many web-based business applications involve forms to fill out, whether they are simply single purpose applications, like a tool to plan the company picnic or a mission critical business application such as a billing system. They are a common denominator of most business processes. Prior to Web 2.0 and technologies such as AJAX, this has not been an easy task.

Last week I spoke with Ashish Deshpande, CEO, frevvo, where they have developed a tool to make forms creation easy in the enterprise 2.0 world. Ashish said that with past applications before AJAX, he found form building one of the more time consuming and less interesting tasks. So now with the new capabilities available for building web forms, he wanted to make the job easy.

Their Live Forms software enables users and developers to easily create rich AJAX forms with built-in business capabilities. Live Forms provides a Web-based design experience that can be embedded into any application. It is designed to easily integrate with most enterprise social software companies, BPM/SOA vendors, Web hosting providers and solution providers.

Live Forms works in a drag and drop manner with no coding required. That’s sounds good to me. It can handle a lot of data types, email, Excel, databases, XML, etc. Behind the form is a type of mashup that pulls the data together. As Ashish wrote in Enterprise Mashups – the next software model, “most corporate web applications require manipulating (viewing, editing, creating …) Customers, Orders, Accounts, Bills, Receipts – typically using HTML forms.” He added that up until now what’s missing is “an easy way to mash up these operations on documents to create Rich Internet Applications. Given that the majority of corporate applications are basically a bunch of forms, frevvo Live Forms provides a great solution – easily mash up these CRUD operations into rich, dynamic, Ajax-based forms – a powerful and simple model for building corporate software applications.” Live Forms works with most web browsers and is available via the SaaS model or through a downloadable application. Here is a sample design screen.

Here is the form from the user’s perspective.

These forms address the middle space between completely unstructured workflows at companies (typically via email) to rigid workflows created by IT using workflow products as Ashish wrote in Forms and Situational Applications. This is the rich space served by Enterprise 2.0. As McKinsey wrote in, The next revolution in interactions, “In today’s developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services.” They said that traditionally the focus of business and IT investments has been on production rather than interactions. Forms are required to record many of these interactions. Ashish likes the IBM term situational applications to cover quickly developed programs to cover work process and interactions as they arise. Providing these tools to end users can help make IT a gardener that supports the growth of applications as they are needed, rather than a gatekeeper. Now we have another tool to make these tasks easier.

Ashish writes the frevvo blog to offer more context on what they are doing and thinking. You can also get a video tour at their site and download a free trial version to try it out.