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Use IBM Lotus Forms on the cloud

Create a car repair application with Lotus Forms Turbo AMI on EC2

Sam Boucot (boucot@gmail.com), Consultant and writer, Freelance

Sam Boucot graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from the University of California in 1986 and has worked for many years as a business systems analyst on large, complex ERP applications at several Fortune 500 companies.

Aaron Olds (amolds@hotmail.com), Systems Engineer, Freelance

Aaron Olds graduated with a M.S. in computer science from Portland State University in 2004. He has worked as a systems engineer on large, complex enterprise applications at several Fortune 500 companies.

Summary: IBM Lotus Forms help organizations of all sizes automate their business processes through data capture, review, approval, and submission of eForms. Lotus Forms can be run from the cloud, which significantly lowers the cost of ownership and dramatically increases scalability. In this tutorial, learn how to write a simple application that allows a small car repair company to track its customers using Lotus Forms, and then run it on the cloud using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). No prior cloud computing experience is necessary.

Date: 29 Jun 2010
Level: Introductory
PDF: A4 and Letter (1490 KB | 43 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 39337 views
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Run the application

The Car Care Request form is now ready to be used by the Car Repair Shop's front office. The shop workers, who only have regular security privileges, will only be able to fill out and submit forms on behalf of the customers. Their supervisors, who have administrative security privileges, will be able to review the results and export the data of submitted forms in PDF files that can ultimately be imported into Excel spreadsheets.

Submit form

After an employee finishes entering customer information on a form, he or she will submit it for review by clicking Submit, as shown in Figure 38.

Figure 38. Form ready for submission
A screen shot of a completed Car Care Request Form that is ready for submission

Confirm the form was successfully submitted

After the form is submitted, a confirmation page will be displayed like the one in Figure 39.

Figure 39. Submitted form confirmation
A screen shot of the Form Submitted page

Review and export submitted data

The Submissions Data tab is used to review the submitted Car Care Request forms. After the results have been reviewed, they can be exported to CVS or PDF files. To export the data, perform the following two steps:

Select the export data file type from the Export File Type drop-down list.
Click Export to export data to a file.

You have just submitted your first Lotus eForm on the cloud. The AMI instance is still running on EC2, but the Car Care Repair Shop has reviewed a customer's car repair request information for accuracy before exporting it to a file for records retention.

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