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A new approach for best practices!

Reading books at the beach during the  holidays can help to find new perspectives. "Lean brain management" from Gunter Dueck from IBM was such a book for me. Therefore I changed my blog from tips and tricks for a successful SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe project to the new title. I hope you will have fun and hopefully learn from it how to avoid these mistakes:

Make a 1:1 conversion of all paper forms:

Do not try to analyze the paper forms. Insttead make a 1:1 transition of all the paper forms to the Adobe Interactive Forms. In many project teams have successfully reduced the number of paper forms by analyzing them and found the common denominator for all these forms. Moreover they designed master formulas at the design time which combines fields from different forms in one form out of which the forms for the users are created at run-time. Avoid this approach as it can speed up your project.

Do not differentiate between online- and offline-forms

A good way to damage your performance is the use of offline-scenarios for online-use. As the forms for offline-scenarios are much bigger normally (due to the need to avoid any check with the backend-system) they could have a very good effect to damage your online performance.

Avoid any guidelines for the layout

Ongoing and fierce discussions about the layout of the forms can make your projects nearly unmanageable. Great! That's exactly what you need. Therefore avoid any guidelines and be open for discussions at any time especially in steering committees sessions where you can discuss about buttons and colours in details.

Make your forms as big as possible:

Adobe has given some recommendations how big your forms should be for a good performance. As you strive for a huge damage you should make your forms as big as possible. The minimum requirements are 10-12 pages, just have a look at the guidelines. But the more pages your forms comprises the better in order to damage your performance.

Avoid usability:

Avoid any help on formulas so that the user is confused. Formulas with very large drop down boxes and many scrollbars can also be very helpful to damage user acceptance.  Therefore always use the original paper size format.

Avoid any frameworks, build everything from scratch:

SAP ECC provides you with two frameworks: ISR (Internal Service Request) and HCM Processes&Forms on top of SAP Interactive forms by Adobe. Chris Solomon has written a lot of christopher.solomon/blog how to use HCM processes & forms in your project to speed up the implementation of processes. This is exactly what you need to avoid in order to damage your project. Build everything from scratch.

Ensure a low Support level for SAP Netweaver 7.0:

Make sure that you do not use the newest support level for SAP Netweaver 7.0. The Adobe-SAP integration has been enhanced with the support packages. By avoiding the newest one you could gain problems and trouble which helps you to achieve your aim.

 

And now: Do the opposite and use all the benefits from the SAP Interactive forms by Adobe technology and enjoy your project. Besides if you want to have a very good help for your SAP Interactive forms by Adobe project read the excellent book from SAP Press.

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