2.0 Tools You can Use: Impressed by Wufoo

By Thomas Purves on May 2, 2007 | | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Do you need a webform for something but you a) don’t know squat about programming or b) know lots of squats but would rather not waste your kunfu on such a mundane thing? Then check out wufoo.

I was setting up this page the other day. Which took a grand total of about 20 minutes end to end. I’d never tried wufoo before, the usability is just that good. And it’s a joy to use. Lovely ajaxy, no programming required other than cutting and pasting a few lines of code to embed the form on my site (even that’s optional). And I got to pick the colors and add my own logo. sweet.

How the times change. The key is you don’t have to ask anyone to do it for you. The skills or the time required is not even a factor anymore with building (very simple) web apps like this.

Instant IT, just add water. recommended.

If we had had an enterprise grade version* of wufoo running behind the firewall at the bank, I can’t even begin to explain the internal process efficiencies that could have been achieved. [meanwhile that particular bank still has entire departments still dedicated to churning out standardized forms based on Word97/2000 and VB Macros - the horror]

*which is a version of wufoo that, sadly, doesn’t exist yet as far as I can tell – but we can always live in hope.

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Topics: enterprise2.0
  • Bunny: integrating is a cinch, just drag and drop, nothing to it.

    Mark: Management control is the big issue... the challenge I've witnessed is that managers don't have control _now_ with the legacy process. Because forms and processes need to be managed by a central group and _not_ the business unit or the actual operations group involved, changes become hard to make, get made using bad assuptions - or just don't happen.

    What you see is a lot of forms/process badly out of sync with the actual facts on the ground - and operations staff resorting to some undocumented/ad-hock/unmanaged kludges when the legacy screens or forms don't allow them to do what actually needs to get done.

    So if you talk to ops staff in deep bowels of the back office, they'll tell you things like "oh we just ignore that whole section of the form because that hasn't applied to the product since 2003" and instead we put the real instructions in the memo field and use these checkboxes to mean something else except on wednesdays, and 'Betty' in the other dept knows what to do with it. (and everything "works" so long as Betty who gets paid $15/hr doesn't quit or get hit by a bus tomorrow etc.) . - scary stuff
  • Sounds good...I'll check it out.

    Ref big banks: You ask a good question about legacy software...it's like the Sorcerer's Apprentice - he can't figure out how to turn it off.... On the other hand, how can you have management control if everybody is creating their own forms?
  • i'd taken a peek at wufoo before but had never actually tried using it for something real. it looks like integrating it into drupal wasn't a problem, then?
  • Thanks for the great writeup, and I'm glad you're enjoying Wufoo. I just wanted to let you know that your form that is embedded sees to cut off the submit button a little short. To fix that, just increase the height of the iframe.
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