Timo Ortiz - SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe

In 2022, SAP and Adobe celebrate the 20th anniversary of their partnership. In recent years, teams on both sides have been working on new versions of SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe. Therefore, this book has been revised and is now available in its third edition.

The success story began in 2002, when SAP SE and Adobe Systems launched a strategic partnership that continues to this day. Their goal was and is to integrate interactive forms and Adobes printing and design expertise into the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and make them available to customers via SAPs business applications.

Adobe already had the necessary technology at that time with the Adobe LiveCycle product group, the core area of which is the conversion of form templates and corresponding data into different output formats: printer languages such as printer definition language (PDL) or even PDF documents. In addition to the generation of output formats, the focus was on the design of forms, and the Adobe portfolio in this area already included Adobe LiveCycle Designer, an interactive graphical tool that allows the creation and editing of the layout of forms.

SAP brought the experience gained from the development of SAPscript and smart forms to the integration of the tools into SAP NetWeaver. The basic approach for integrating Adobe technology into SAP applications was adopted from smart forms, which made it easier for most developers to move to those new technologies.

Today, development responsibilities are largely split between Adobe and SAP. While Adobe continues to develop the core technology, SAP improves the integration and frameworks built on top of the technology.

SAP S/4HANA also marked the beginning of a new chapter. Here, the development of the new form templates is no longer integrated into the SAP NetWeaver environment. In addition, Adobe fragments capabilities were introduced to be used in master and content form templates. The data supply for these new fragment-based form templates is handled via SAP Gateway services. Thus, a new era is currently beginning for experienced form developers. This is also made clear by the fact that a new type of output control, based on the Business Rules Framework plus (BRFplus), has been introduced for SAP S/4HANA. The new output control and the new form templates will gradually replace and supersede all previous frameworks and form templates. In addition, with SAP S/4HANA, more and more functions will be outsourced to SAP Fiori apps. In addition, Adobe Document Services (ADS) for processing forms will now also be provided as a cloud solution with the new SAP Forms service by Adobe.

So now is the right time to familiarize yourself with this technology. By reading this book, youll be well on your way to doing so.

The advantages of PDF-based print forms technology are obvious: In addition to pure print output, the generation of interactive PDF forms(i.e., PDF files) with interactive form fields when opened with Adobe Acrobat Readerenable further possible uses. Interactive forms are used in various SAP solutions; for example, numerous examples can be found for SAP Business Suite in the areas of financials and human capital management. SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), for example, has also delivered an interactive form for lead management by a partner company as a standard since version 5.0.