JetForm - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

JetForm was the name of a Canadian software manufacturer created by four consultants (Wayne Hall, Bob Allum, Tom Hicks http://4point.com/images/executive-team/tom-hicks.jpg http://4point.com/executive-team.html, and John Gleed) that was based out of Ottawa, Ontario, and an electronic form software product of the same name.

JetForm once had major offices in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, various countries in Europe, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, and New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. It was founded in 1982, and was listed under NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

as FORMF, under the Pacific Stock Exchange as JTF, and the Toronto Stock Exchange

Toronto Stock Exchange

Toronto Stock Exchange is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the seventh largest in the world by market capitalisation. Based in Canada's largest city, Toronto, it is owned by and operated as a subsidiary of the TMX Group for the trading of senior equities...

as JFM.

History

The company was originally named Indigo Software and was solely a software consulting firm. Indigo Software did work for the Canadian Federal Government

Government of Canada

The Government of Canada, formally Her Majesty's Government, is the system whereby the federation of Canada is administered by a common authority; in Canadian English, the term can mean either the collective set of institutions or specifically the Queen-in-Council...

and IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

(as the maintainer of an IBM CAD software product); among other clients. One significant government project resulted in an electronic forms product being created: iFiller, iPrint, et al.

With Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's release of Windows 3.11

Windows 3.1x

Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...

, Indigo Software did a major enhancement to the forms software and re-branded it JetForm. The JetForm forms product was very successful, and Indigo Software's consulting work also began to focus on work associated with the JetForm software. Given the popularity of the forms software, Indigo Software made a decision to rename the company JetForm.

Its eponym

Eponym

An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

ous series of products directly competed against other electronic forms software, such as Delrina

Delrina

Delrina was a Canadian software company founded by four individuals, Dennis Bennie as CEO and chairman, Mark Skapinker as president, Bert Amato as executive vice president and chief technical officer and Lou Ryan as executive vice president of world wide sales...

's PerForm

PerForm

PerForm and PerForm PRO were electronic form programs, initially designed to work under GEM in DOS. Later versions were designed to work in Windows 3.1, at which point it was succeeded by FormFlow....

, and FormFlow

FormFlow

FormFlow was the name of a line of electronic forms products initially created and sold by Delrina in the early- to mid-1990s. The first product in this line was PerForm, which was designed to work under GEM in DOS...

products.

In September, 1996, Symantec

Symantec

Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...

, which had bought Delrina the previous year, sold their Electronic Forms Division to JetForm. JetForm continued to develop the FormFlow series of products under its own name.

Around this time, JetForm bought the naming rights

Naming rights

In the private sector, naming rights are a financial transaction whereby a corporation or other entity purchases the right to name a facility, typically for a defined period of time. For properties like a multi-purpose arena, performing arts venue or an athletic field, the term ranges from three...

to the Ottawa Baseball Stadium, naming it "JetForm Park".

On September 13, 2001, JetForm changed its name to Accelio. Accelio was acquired by Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

in April 2002. The electronic forms products were officially retired in 2004. Adobe marketed JetForm as Adobe Central Output Server http://www.adobe.com/products/server/outputserver/, without any major changes. Adobe's successor for the JetForm technology was released June 7, 2007, as Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES)http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/, part of the Adobe LiveCycle

Adobe LiveCycle

Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a SOA Java EE-based server software product from Adobe Systems Incorporated used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies...

suite. As Adobe abandoned JetForms's technology, a number of customers that relied on JetForm's software chose as continuity option the implementation of DocPath's solutions.

JetForm Software

JetForm Design allowed for routing and tracking in workflow systems, on-screen form creation, and access to SQL

SQL

SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....

and ODBC-compliant databases. JetForm Filler was used for completing on-screen forms. JetForm also developed XFA

XFA

XFA stands for XML Forms Architecture, a family of proprietary XML specifications that was suggested and developed by JetForm to enhance the processing of web forms. It can be also used in PDF files starting with PDF 1.5 specification...

, which was later adopted by Adobe into its PDF software.

One of the Indigo Forms software's innovations when it was introduced was its ability to have its forms installed into Laserjet font cartridges. This meant that the product only had to send forms data to the printer; since the form was already encoded in the font cartridge. Given the slow printer interfaces used at that time, this greatly reduced print times.

External links

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