AEM Forms: An Introduction

Forms are part of almost every site these days, from complex enterprise-level sites to a small site run by your local deli owner. But how do you make forms that appeal to multiple different sites and users, and more importantly, allow them to interact with the site? After all, we want our users to get in touch, right?

The problem is, oftentimes content management systems have a clunky, or complicated way of implementing forms. Fortunately, AEM 6.0 comes with an out-of-the-box module called AEM Forms. Over the last couple of releases, more and more features have been added, making it a breeze to reuse and customize forms from page-to-page. And, more importantly, connect with your customers.

Benefits of AEM Forms
AEM Forms comes with a variety of features, but we’ve outlined a list of ten we’ve found to be most beneficial.

1. Easy to use UI: AEM Forms makes use of Touch UI, which allows for an easy-to-use authoring interface.
2. Forms Portal: The AEM Forms Portal provides a central location to manage all your documents and forms. Making it easy to search for forms that you’ve created or migrated.
3. Adaptive Forms: Adaptive Forms are a key component of AEM Forms. They can be based on a specific schema or form template that allows you to break large forms into logical sections.
4. Rule Editor: Adaptive Forms come with a feature called the rule editor. It allows you to perform actions such as hiding or showing content based on the user input. Previously this would have required development, but now authors can easily add or remove rules.
5. Form Fragments: Form Fragments allow users the ability to reuse sections and components of forms throughout the entire site.
6. Device Features: Access to the camera or data picker speeds up data entry, encouraging users to complete and submit forms.
7. Adobe Analytics: Tightly coupled integration with Adobe Analytics allows you to measure form completion rates, and aim for greater efficiency and optimization in form interactions.
8. Components: All forms have: dynamic layout (responsive), form field validation, ability to save forms on the server, and integration with HTML workspace for data capture (capture customer data to auto-fill any forms view in the future).
9. Themes: Provides authors with the flexibility to hot-swap different client libs/styling for various forms.
10. Correspondence Management: AEM Forms comes with a feature that allows users to easily create correspondence such as letters. Much of the functionality with correspondence can either be user-generated, or system generated.

More to Come
Up until AEM 6.0, the forms' capability of the system were pretty lackluster. You had to either use some of their OOTB form components, which were typically clunky, hard to use, and poorly coded and/or create a completely custom solution on your own. But now, with this latest version of AEM, we have functionalities that are key to creating reusable and customizable forms.

We’ve just scratched the surface of AEM forms in this blog post. Look for the next parts of this series in the coming weeks where we will touch on a variety of topics like: adaptive forms, reusability, and an underlying technology overview.