For businesses interesting in interacting with customers without the programming cost of hiring a developer to add forms to their website, Adobe's new FormsCentral offers another solution.

The new offering from Adobe makes it easy to create and publish forms online.

How It Works

The data collection is done on Adobe's servers and managing the data afterwards is simple.

Adobe has many pre-built templates, such as contact us, feedback and registration forms, to make it easy for businesses to build and deploy forms. Customizing one of the pre-built forms, or adding or changing a field, for example, can be done in a couple of clicks with no programming knowledge.

Once a form has been created, you have the option of creating a message someone sees when a form is submitted and you can also share the link to the form either through email or social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

All forms are published using SSL encryption, which protects data that is submitted online. Currently, data can only be exported out of the system manually. Adobe says it plans to include an API interface in the future, so that other software programs will be able to connect to and access the data automatically.

Limitations

E-commerce transactions and integration with payment gateways, like Paypal, are not possible in the initial version of Form Central. Businesses should also note that forms cannot currently be embedded into pages on their own websites.

Pricing

There are three pricing tiers available:

FormCentral is currently available in English, with plans for more languages to come. A French version is expected for later this year.

Screenshots (click on a thumbnail to see a larger image)

Editing Toolbars

Templates

Sample Data Report

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