Create!form, Covus, Optio

[tberry6433]

Hi list.

I am going to be looking at demos of Create!form, Covus (Formscape) and Optio in a few weeks. We are primarily looking at basic distribution, electronic payments, laser checks and positive pay. I'd be very interested in any comments, pro or con, on any of the three products. Any gotchas encountered? Any unexpected complications? If you had it to do over would you still make the same choice?

Thanks.

 

[jde_mi]

Isn't there a forum you missed posting this message to?

 

[donrsimpson]

Dear Jim,

We have used both Optio and Create!form for several JDE clients and I can
give you several direct references from some Fortune 500 clients if you
would like to contact me.

If you can be more descriptive about your Enterprise environment and what
application solution you are looking for these products to provide I can
give you a more detailed example of how each of these product have worked in
similar environments for similar solutions.

Best regards,

Dr. Donald R. Simpson Jr. PhD, CSc
General Manager & Partner, SSC Inc.
Stratagem, Inc. (SSC) - A Subsidiary of Capital Alliance Holdings, LLC
Consulting and Executive Recruiting
PeopleSoft Alliance Consulting Partner – www.peoplesoft.com 
3333 Warrenville Rd., Suite 200 # 73
Lisle, IL 60532
Phone: (630) 961-5662
Fax: (630) 961-5644
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.Stratagem.US




Don R. Simpson
Stratagem Systems Consulting, Inc. (SSC)PeopleSoft Allainace Service Partner
3333 Warrenville Rd., Suite 200 # 73, (630) 961-5662, www.stratagem.us, [email protected]

 

[mtbinpa]

Hi-

We currently use Create!form and I am overall pleased with what it provides. We use the forms for printing Purchase Orders, Delivery Receipts, Sales Acknowledgements, BOLs, Invoices, checks and a few other reports designed for our end users. I was in charge of the implementation and a "gotcha" would be that there were a few things in the install document that really came back to haunt us. The customer service is pretty much hit or miss with the quality I would expect from a vendor. I was actually at their corporate HQ location up in Waltham, MA and they are still a pretty small organization.

Highlights of Create!form:
1. Ease of use of the forms designer
2. Easy integration into your JDE environment
3. Fax/Email is very easy to install and use
4. Debugging issues is easy as long as you know the structure of how everything is set up

Downfalls of Create!form:
1. Create!stream scripts are proprietary and cumbersome
2. When a new version of a batch is created in JDE, the form projects are not "smart" enough to recognize the change (i.e. fields are populated on the new version that should be hidden)
3. Customer service is hit or miss

Like I said, overall I am quite happy with it because I know how everything is set up and can debug an issue very quickly. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]

Tim Kramer
Systems Analyst/Report Writer

 

[tonycoval]

My personal rule of thumb for recommendations has been as follows from
polling dozens upon dozens of customers (and if there are different
opinions, I really do want to hear them):

Create!Form - If your requirements are pretty standard, this is the best
solution, as it is the easiest to setup and manage - very plug and play.
But, if you need to make changes to configuration it can be very painful,
and since the acquisition, there have been some support issues, which I am
sure will get sorted out...

Formscape - A more robust toolset for custom configuration, but a bit more
involved in the management and setup... Recommended for customers needing
more control over their output. Also they took a jumpstart in the evolution
past PDF scraping into XML, which gets kudos in my book.

Optio - The leader for Unix platformed customers, and while some amazing
things can be done with the product with an expert, there have been numerous
complaints in past years... I don't want to slam them, just reporting on
the response...

So in short, signs point to Create! for your described needs, but be sure
that you get some "what-ifs" into your demo so you can see what it takes for
some hypothetical changes, because you know as well as I that things are
gonna friggin change

Tony Brackett
Board Member
The I Consortium, Inc.
www.jdeicons.com
[email protected]
603.487.5477 Phone
603.218.6148 Fax

 

[jdharv]

Hi Jim,

In my completely biased opinion ;-), you should add Formtastic to your list of demos. As a vendor, I'll keep this short and low-key. You can find more details on Formtastic here:

http://www.quadrantsoftware.com/solution/formtastic/index.htm

And details on a new solution (Formatter) that ties directly into Formtastic:

http://www.quadrantsoftware.com/new/press/formatter.htm

Cheers,
John D. Harvey