Createform vs BI

Was wondering if anyone out there has upgraded their Enterprise One software and
A) moved from Createform to BI.
B) stayed with Createform.
C) when back to Createform from BI.

What are the pros and cons of Createform and BI?

Can BI completely replace Createform?

How good is the BI burst and bind procedure?

Did people out there go to BI and then have to move back to Createform?

Am trying to find out what other people have found and it would be good to know approximately when you did this research as the BI product or Createform product may have changed their features.

We have a hudge investment in Createform for Enterprise One World and thru third party applications. We use Createform to do most of our interface reporting, cheque run reporting, EFT Notices, Purchase Orders, Bank cheques with MICR line, Student Statements with OCR line, third party reports that do not come thru Enterprise One, HR letters, HR email notification, HR Crystal reports, T4A's, Miscellaneous third party Crystal reports, etc. We make heavy use of the Createform Burst and Bind procedure. We also make heavy use of the repaginating process in Createform to remove whitespace.

We've been on CF for many years and in fact, I'm in the middle of upgrading all our forms from 3.2 to 7.x/CTIS. I did look into BI Publisher a couple years back and I just don't see it as a "fully baked" replacement for a Forms package, in particular CreateForm. I do know of companies that have been successful in moving to BIP for "basic" stuff like checks but I still just do not get the feeling that it is up for big, more complex E1 output and successful burst/bind output. I still also hear that it is not very intuitive so the learning curve may be there as well going to that product. We also heavily use CreateEmail for distribution of lots of stuff.

Just know that if you are NOT currently on 7.x/CTIS from CreateForm and you are moving to E1 9.1, you will need to upgrade to it. Older CF products will not work with 9.1 output.

Cathy,

We have recently gone live with E910 and upgraded to CF7. We kept CF for one main reason - CF Director. BIP can't replicate the Director functionality. Other reasons are based on advice we have received (from our upgrade partner and others) as I haven't looked at BIP closely myself. If I remember correctly (please correct me if this is not right/accurate), the more complicated formatting that CF does is beyond the capabilities of BIP without buying another product/module.

This is very helpful. We are currently on 8.0 of ERP 1 and are going to 9.1

We are currently using Createform 3.x and 6.x for many complex form products. We have Createform projects that are part of ERP and many createform projects set up from many other third party applications. We use Createform for the distribution of many reports coming in from Crystal. Am hoping to stay with Createform but Management was told that Createform can be replaced by BI.

We understand that we have to upgrade to Createform 7 to make our changes. Would like to hear from more people that looked at BI to replace Createform and what they found. Would like to hear from people that went to BI and then moved back to Createform. Would also like to hear from people that sucessfully moved to BI.

Lastly, did anyone out there go directly to Createform Transform instead of going to Createform 7. This meant you had to rewrite all your projects?

Cathy,

we were not a CreateForms user but a Optio user. At the time we upgraded to TR 9.1 Optio was not supported and BottomLine's message was "upgrade" to another BottomLine product".

So we went to BI Publisher.

We only had around around 20 forms/documents to convert to BIP, but it was a much longer process than we anticipated - close to 3 months rather than the 1 month planned.

Here's the issues we ran into as I remember them:

1. Conditional images (Logos, signatures, etc.) which may need to share space with other conditional images or text - this was very difficult and "finicky" to setup and maintain.

2. Multiple "languages" - xmlt, XSL/XSLT, XDOXSLT, ...

3. Poor support for faxing (solved by emailing to a fax service)

4. Dependency on MS Word for formatting templates. Sensitive to MS Updates.

5. Alternate page headers or page headers that are different than the 1st page. Doable but again took time to figure out.

6. Document Footers that only appear on last page of document complicated to setup.

7. Email options are subpar. Cannot dynamically change the "From" address using data/variables. Method of placing variables in Subject and Body test is hokey (need to setup DD items and Data Structures - all time consuming).

There were more issues but I can't remember them all.

On the positive side the integration with JDE is quite good. From Work with Submitted Jobs if the user clicks to view the output they see the BIP version of the output. In addition from there you can see the output distribution, etc.

Simple forms / layouts are actually pretty quick and easy to create in BIP - easier than they were in Optio DCS.

Now that we're through the initial "pain" its not bad except for the email weaknesses.

Are you buying the enterprise version of BIP? I ask because the embedded version can't be used to burst/distribute Crystal. I doubt that the Enterprise version can easily accomplish this if at all.

If your management is thinking of replacing crystal reports with BIP ... well, I hope they don't make you drink the kool-aid.

Many of our Crystal reports come from third party applications. We use Createform heavily for other applications outside of ERP 1. All of our software tries to make use of our burst and bind feature in Createform or the forms design features of Createform. None of these applications are changing.

Cathy,

That is similar to our situation. We have third party uses of the create!form software (text using C!f 6). At this point these have not been upgraded to C!f 7 and are running on the old server. We will need to upgrade these to C!f 7 in the near future, but it will be done separately to the JDE upgrade.

On a side note, we actually have multiple/separate E1 instances running either 8.12 or 9.0. We had one instance upgrading to 9.1 (went live yesterday) so we "had" to move to 7.x for that upgrade. I used a bit of Bottomline Consulting to get us started on the migration of the forms for the company going to 9.1 and gathered enough information to start migrating our other companies still on 3.2 forms to 7.x forms. Also had them help us setup the new server/software as well so that we followed how we had done things on the 3.2 server.

So far it has gone pretty well. This did not take "months", it really only tooks a few weeks (per company) once we had the server and some knowledge under our belts. We have lots of forms for each and so far, very few hiccups have occurred and were quickly resolved on my end. Issues tended to be with conditional setting stuff on the forms that is slightly different (and better) in 7.x. It has also resolved quite a few issues I had on forms in 3.2 that I had "work arounds".

Getting them up to speed on 7.x PRIOR to a 9.1 upgrade should certainly be done so that you can work out any kinks on your forms BEFORE "new" 9.1 PDF's come along and you need to revisit your forms again with new 9.1 PDF's to see if there are any issues that come up. I don't think we had any, and if we did, they were small.

When we went to Service Package 24 just recently we had a problem with all of our createstream projects. THe conditional logic on the createstream server was no longer working. Someone told us that was because the PDF files were coming out as compressed. So we converted all of our 3.x Createstream projects to Director projects. After we did that some of our large JDE ERP E1 PDF's that do splitting went from 30 minutes to 10-12 hours. Waiting to go to Createform 7 to fix slow processing problem. Bottomline told us we would be in a better position if everything was in Director script when we converted. My coworker told us that there was a recommendation to put a change in our JDE.INI but we have not tried it yet.

Hello Larry,
We are having the same issues as you have listed in your post. I am currently stuck at conditional images..
Would you have an example of how to use Conditional Images in JDE Invoices/checks?
Appreciate any help.
Thank You!

Hello again Cathy,

There are several ways to accomplish this depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Method 1: Placeholder image in RTF document that is sized for the space you want any images to consume.

- Insert "dummy" placeholder image and size appropriately.
- Right-click on image - select "Format Picture", select "Alt Text" tab, enter url:{xxxxxxxxxxx} where xxxxxxxx is a literal url -or- a variable from the UBE XML file. Examples:
url:{'http://imageserver/signatures/ceo.jpg'}
url:{SigURL_ID152}
- Note: 'Format Picture' option may not appear if image is embedded in a table cell. If so cut, paste outside table, make change, and cut/paste back.

Method 2: Load images via a field that is wrapped by if and endif fields.
IF - <?if:Company_ID139='00025'?>
Logo - <fo:block><fo:external-graphic src="\\jdebatch1\BIPublisher\Images\WISI Logo Only.jpg"/></fo:block>
ENDIF - <?end if?>

Hope this helps.

Regards,

FYI to do Text Watermarking on document (such as PROOF gray background) create a field which in turn defines a variable containing the watermark text. In the below examples WM is the field that based on presence and/or content of XML field Generation_Mode_ID304 will set variable wMark = 'P R O O F' or blank.
In Word set custom watermark text to that variable.

WM = <xsl:variable name="wMark" select="xdoxslt:ifelse(.//Generation_Mode_ID304='P R O O F’,'P R O O F','')"/>

Text Watermark text value = <?$wMark?>

Thanks a lot Larry.
I tried the variable from UBE XML method - I named the signature files as Address Book number of the approvers, and assigned address book number to the variable.But it's not working for me.It does not show any image.
Do you have an RTF template that you could upload so that I can check my code as against yours?

Thanks a lot.Really appreciate your help.

Did you include the full path to where your images are in the UBE/XML variable?

Are the image files accessible by your batch server (runtime) and your development client?

Are you using a http or file url?

We put our image files in a shared folder on the Enterprise Batch Server (Windows) and made sure permissions were set so that production processes and the developers could access them via a file url.
Example: <SigURL_ID152>file://jdebatch1/bipublisher/images/sigline.jpg</SigURL_ID152>

Larry,
We are not live yet on BI Publisher so I am trying to build this template using a local folder as of now.

I have the following as my variable value:
file:///C:/SignatureFolder/S35386.bmp

I have the following in Alt Text:
url:{Signature_ID2}
(I tried putting single quotes too).

I get some java related "NonValidatingParser.parseDocument" errors.
Thanks a lot for all the help!

"S35386.bmp"

there's one of your problems. Bitmap images aren't supported. Use jpg, png, or gif.

You also seem to have one too many / after file:

Follow this link for a good basic reference on BIP.

Larry,

The path that I have pasted here works fine if I put directly under Alt Text on the dummy image. It stops working as soon as I put it on a variable and assign the variable as the URL under Alt Text.
I tried with other file types too, it's not working for me yet.
I will try placing it in another section and test it that way.
Thanks a lot for the link - seems like lots of useful information.

Thanks!

For people who might be looking at a solution for the same-

I put this under Alt Text -
url:{concat(.//Image_DIR_ID35,'/',.//Image_ID34)}

Value of Image_DIR_ID35 -> C:\Images
Value of Image_ID34 -> Sig.jpg

Thanks

Hi
We will be using BI Publisher for check print (R04572) and I would like your opinion on how to protect the RTF templates to protect the signature jpgs. With world, ACOM was used and was protected under a lock and key. The signature images do not need to be conditional but will be embedded in the RTF Template. We have 2 users that should have access.
We will be using E9.10

Do you use the bind process at all in CF7 and if not what do you use instead of bind? We are trying to upgrade our bind processes and Bottomline told us to stop using bind. We are in the process of just updating to CF7. We are having some issues with Bind now that Bottomline split their bind process into two pieces.