Hello all,
I'm looking for a bit of advice on some direction that has been forced upon me through my enterprise licensing with LiveCycle and Adobe in general. Recently, the people who procure our software decided not to include LiveCycle in our Adobe package. This probably is due to the fact that Adobe separated LiveCycle from Adobe Pro and the standalone fee is too high.
Ok, so that being said, I started learning how to use LiveCycle a number of months ago and had a lot of success. We used it to build and edit PDF forms that are used by our clients to provide reports on work that they do. It is mandatory that they fill out these forms annually. We had a number of major changes to these forms that we were undertaking when the licensing got cancelled. So, now I am in a bit of a flux as I have unfinished forms and I need some direction on what to do next. I am being relied upon to seek out alternatives. My background in this area isn't strong. I've googled around the net looking for alternative solutions to Livecycle. I'm not finding anything. I do see a number of other software packages (there seems to be hundreds!) that do form building and I am having a hard time weeding through the options. So I thought I would ask for some advice.
To be a little more specific, the forms I had built use a lot of customization via JavaScript (validation, formula's to calculate a Cost Statement table, formatting of text values, etc). It was a combination of standalone JavaScript API coding and some of the XFA stuff.
So, the first thing I have been tasked to do is to find software that will allow me to edit these forms and make regular updates. I'm just not sure what other software out there will do some of the same things at a reasonable cost.
The second thing, and this part is only an idea at this time, is to move towards a web form. Something that can accomplish all the same validation and customization that I am doing with my standalone forms and can dump the information entered into the form, into a database on my servers here at the office (generally, when we receive our PDF forms, this data is entered into a database we have). I simply do not have any experience with online forms which is why I haven't moved in this direction yet.
Anyways, I'm interested in any advice. keep in mind my skill level here. Something overly complex may not work for me at this point as I need to find a solution sooner than later.
Cheers.