How does it work?
The Blue Form has been designed with simplicity in mind. You can get up and running
within a matter of minutes by following these simple steps:
- Register your company
or organisation and wait for your confirmation email.
- Log onto the site and create user accounts for the other people in your company.
You can assign people to different groups.
- You can now design your forms, specify how many approvers each form will need and
who those approvers will be.
- That's it! You're done. The users you registered can now start filling out your
forms. Whenever an approver needs to approve a form, they will receive an email
with a link to the form. The form will also be visible from a work queue on their
home page.
Click here to view a series of Macromedia Flash demos which will
help you understand the application.
How do these workflows work?
Each time you design a form, you must specify what the approval workflow will be
for that form. For example an Expense Form may need approval by a person's line
manager and then again by the company's Financial Controller, hence it would require
a 2 approver workflow. The way you make the workflow work is entirely up to you.
You can specify up to three approvers for a form and you can control who these approvers
are. An approver can either be a user that each form initiator chooses from a field
on the form (e.g. a dropdown list of line managers), or an approver could always
be a specific user (e.g. the company's CEO) or the approver could be any user from
a specified user group (e.g. a group of people working in the Acocunts Department,
any of whom could approve the form).
You can choose one of four approval workflows: (hover mouse over the text to view flow diagram)
- Self Approval
- 1 Approver
- 2 Approvers
- 3 Approvers
What happens after an initiator fills in a form?
Depending on the workflow, the approriate approver is notifed. If no approvers were
specifed on the form's workflow, the form is set to a status of 'Closed'.
How do approvers know there is a form for them to approve?
Each time an approver needs to action a form, they are notifed by email. The form
also appears in the worklist on their home page.
What happens when an approver approves a form?
The next approver in the workflow is notified. If the approver was the last approver,
an email is sent to the initiator notifying them that their form was fully approved
and the form's status is set to 'Closed'.
What happens when an approver rejects a form?
The approver can enter comments onto the form and reject it to send it back to the
initiator. The form's status is set to 'Rejected' and it is sent back to the initiator.
The initiator can either change the form and re-submit or they can cancel the form.
What happens if an approver is unable to approve the form?
If an approver is unable to approve a form for any reason, Administrators can take ownership of forms, and approve them in place of the approver.
Once somebody fills out a form, who has access to see it?
- The person who filled out the form, will always have access to view it.
- Users who need to approve a from will have access to view the data in the form and
enter comments. They can also either Approve the form or Reject (send the form back
to the initiator).
- Users who are members of the "Administrators" group can view every form in the system.
How can I apply The Blue Form to my needs?
Click here for some examples of how organisations are currently using The Blue Form.
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