Christopher Atwood, Director of Academic Technology at Pomfret School, recently talked to us about how the school uses Adobe FormsCentral as a rich, collaborative, and environmentally responsible course registration and assessment tool. Pomfret administrators looked at how they could automate many document processes that traditionally relied on paper. With a history of success using Adobe software in classrooms, school administrators turned to Adobe to help automate several routing processes. Atwood says, “With Adobe FormsCentral we’ve expanded our relationship with Adobe and now have exactly the right solution to tackle a variety of administrative challenges.”

For example, Adobe FormsCentral provides Pomfret School a flexible platform to create and deliver registration and testing forms to students at the beginning of each school year. At the same time, skills-assessment forms for math and other subjects are made available online to incoming students, enabling Pomfret to place students in classes best-suited to their skill levels. The Adobe solution also streamlines sharing student assessments with teachers, who no longer have to wait for paper-based tests to arrive by mail or come back to campus to pick up assessments. To learn more about how Pomfret School is using Adobe FormsCentral, click here.

Todd Gerber, group product marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

We feel very lucky to be hearing from all of you about what you need in a good cloud-based forms authoring and distribution service. As you may have read, we’ve recently been able to implement several brand new features that you have been asking about for some time. In several installments over the next week or two, we’ll take a closer look at these features and what you can now newly do with Adobe FormsCentral!

New feature #1: Page Skip Logic

This addition was one of the features most often requested on the forum and through e-mail feedback to the team. Until now, respondents have had to go through all questions on a form, and in some cases, only a subset of respondents would need to respond to all of those. Thus, you may have been required to include apologies like “If you answered yes to the last question, go to question 3. If you answered no, go to question 4.”

No longer! Now, with either the Basic or the Plus plan, you can add rules to your page breaks that allow questions to be skipped altogether.

For the full post, click here.

New feature #2: Summary Reports

Summary reports. These beauties are now built into your forms once data starts flowing in; without exporting any data or fussing around with other spreadsheet programs, you can view your form’s responses graphically. Today, we’ll go through the details of what these summaries can do for you in FormsCentral.

For the full post, click here.

New feature #3: Form Templates

Now, born of your innovation (and your many requests for new ways to kick-start certain form types), we present 7 new form templates to support the various ways in which you’ve been using FormsCentral. We like to keep them organized by category, so here they are, according to the type of form they represent.

For the full post, click here.

Rebecca Staley, Acrobat.com marketing specialist, Acrobat Solutions

If you’ve ever collected data or used any kind of submission form for your organization, don’t miss this chance to win a free year of Adobe FormsCentral, built by the Acrobat Solutions team with a legacy of PDF forms expertise!  Just jump on your Twitter account and tune in for a series of helpful tips & Acro-facts – all you have to do is ReTweet our posts with the hashtag #FormsCentral to enter!  FormsCentral is one of the easiest ways to collect, analyze, and report on your data.  Learn more about the latest new features such as Summary Reports, Rating Scales, Apply Skip Logic, Twitter integration and more.

From Wednesday, August 3^rd through the 10^th, any Acrobat follower who ReTweets our #FormsCentral posts will be eligible for a yearlong FormsCentral subscription!  Help us spread the word on the latest updates and features to be added to FormsCentral!

FormsCentral is designed to provide the most up to date, intuitive and useful services for your business, so don’t miss a chance to win a yearlong subscription for free!  Check the Acrobat Twitter account for the latest updates and information. Be sure to pay attention to the Acrobat account for your chances to RT, and follow us for more information and of course winner announcements.

The contest opens 9 a.m., Wednesday, August 3^rd, 2011, and closes 2 p.m., Thursday, August 11^th, 2011. The prize drawing will occur on or before 5 p.m., August 11^th, 2011, with the winner announcement occurring that day as well. The drawings are open to residents in North America only.

FormsCentral adds summary reports, ratings scale, skip logic, Twitter integration and more

Since we introduced our online forms service, FormsCentral, we’ve seen all sorts of organizations – from businesses and educational institutions to nonprofits – take advantage of the simplicity and speed our service provides to design, distribute, collect, and analyze data from HTML forms and surveys. Customers have been using FormsCentral for everything from grant applications and satisfaction surveys to class and event registration, as well as research. With the help of FormsCentral, they are moving their organizations forward, maintaining brand integrity, and creating worthwhile experiences for their constituencies. What’s more, they did all this without having to call the IT department.

While FormsCentral has made the task of creating surveys and collecting and analyzing data simpler than ever, there were a few loose ends.  We took a look at the wish lists and the pain points of both forms creators and forms fillers and have added several new features, including the following that we are announcing today:

• Create Summary Reports – Automatically generate a summary report for each form or survey you create. For each chart in the report, decide whether to display the caption, absolute count, or percentage of the total. Export the summary report to PDF or as a zip file of all the images to place directly in a presentation.
• Add Rating Scales – Get quick insights into customer opinions regarding your product or services – are they satisfied or unsatisfied with our level of support, ease of use?
• Apply Page Skip Logic – Tailor the form path with your respondent’s answers. With the easy-to-use interface you can define which page of your form respondents go to next based on their answer(s) to a previous question or even a combination of questions. (Paid-only feature)
• Redirect after submit – After respondents submit the form, redirect them to your website from the confirmation page or send them back to an empty form so they can fill it out again. (Paid-only feature)
• Embed your form – Cut-and-paste provided HTML code into your website or wiki and the form you created appears directly within your site. As always, responses are collected and stored within FormsCentral where you can analyze and share results easily.
• Integrate with Twitter – Sign into Twitter and post a message with a link to your form or survey from within FormsCentral.

We created FormsCentral to save you time and allow you to respond faster to customer and business needs. We think we’ve made FormsCentral even easier to use and more customizable with these new capabilities. For small and medium sized businesses that need an easy platform to create professional, branded forms, FormsCentral is the answer.

And it’s affordable! A free account gives you one form and up to 50 responses, and you can begin collecting and reviewing responses immediately. For $14.99 per month, you can create up to five forms and collect 500 responses per form. For $199 a year, you can create any unlimited number of forms or surveys and get up to 5,000 responses each.

If you haven’t yet tried FormsCentral, now is a great time to get all the details and go for a free test drive. When you see how it can add a new dimension to your business, we’ll think you’ll be sold.

Randy Swineford, group product manager, Acrobat Solutions

Time for our final question in our March (Acro) Madness Twitter Contest Series! Thanks to everyone for such great responses so far. Be sure to tag your response with #WinningWednesdays!

Here’s the final question and the lucky winner will receive Premium Plus 1 year subscriptions to both FormsCentral and SendNow available at Acrobat.com, valued at approximately more than $400.00:

What was the last form you filled out?

The contest opens 10 a.m., Wednesday, March 23, 2011, and closes 2 p.m., Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The prize drawing will occur on or before 5 p.m., March 29, 2011. The drawings are open to residents in North America only. For the complete rules see here.

Be sure to follow @Acrobat for future contests and prizes next month!

Now that you’ve had some time to check out the Adobe FormsCentral service and poke around the form-building environment, it’s time to catch up on how best to use it. Over the next few days, Acrobat Solutions team member Rebecca Staley will be diving into some of the top features of FormsCentral with a three-part blog series.

Today, Rebecca kicks off the series by highlighting how to create your form and the tools that’ll help you do it; later this week week, she’ll carry on with testing and distributing your form, and finally she’ll take a look at analyzing all the data you garner over the course of your form’s life.

For now, read on for the down-low on form creation in FormsCentral with today’s post here.