Formlify for Australian Higher Education

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Your organisation

You are the CEO, General Manager, Deputy Vice Chancellor or Director/Assistant Director at a university or college of higher education. Your campus will include thousands of students enrolled in hundreds of courses, and hundreds of staff ranging from teachers to cleaners.

Your responsibilities include:

• Delivering quality education and services to students
• Making sure that student records are accurate and current
• Providing students with up-to-date information about available courses
• Ensuring compliance with government and other legislation
• Making sure that your managers, supervisors, teachers and other staff operate in line with your institution’s protocols and government regulations.

Your Challenges

You’re operating in a dynamic environment due to frequent changes in government legislation and funding, and fluid market conditions. Tertiary education has become highly competitive and many institutions have become reliant on revenue from foreign students. Funding is a constant concern.

You can’t respond quickly to change because your IT environment comprises diverse IT systems bridging diverse areas from education to finance, human resources and operations. Many of these are legacy systems with limited ability to adapt. Your IT staff is already stretched keeping these systems operating and defending against frequent attempts to hack your large database of students and staff.

To cope, your staff often create new paper forms and Excel spreadsheets to meet new demands and regulations and save them on their individual PCs. This has filled some gaps but added complexity and inconsistency that takes more time and effort to co-ordinate and manage.

Your Options

1. Improve your existing systems
As a rule, it isn’t easy for your IT people to add new functionality to enterprise systems and legacy systems increase the challenge. External contractors face similar issues with legacy systems, since they have to reverse engineer much of the code. You could add point solutions on PCs to cover emerging needs, but that would complicate the control and management of your IT environment which is already complex. This is your best option if increasing IT complexity is not a concern.

2. Use a simple form builder
Your most pressing need is to capture new or extra data in relation to changes in areas like enrolments, new courses or new activities planned. You could install simple form-building software for staff to build forms that students can fill, and there are many that fit this bill. However, they aren’t suited to complex applications since they can’t be conditional or responsive, they don’t enable control of design, approval or publication and they won’t integrate with your other business systems. This is your best option if a simple solution will do the job and integration with other systems is not a priority.

3. Use a high end, enterprise solution
There are powerful and feature-rich solutions that deliver all the benefits of online, automated forms. Generally, they’re offered by large global vendors at prices that reflect their features and are designed for large enterprises. However, their functionality can exceed your requirements in higher education, and make these solutions difficult to understand and work with, even after extensive training. This will be an option if budgets are not of great concern to you.

4. Use a feature-rich, cost-effective solution
These are intelligent purpose-built form builders with built-in workflows and conditional logic, that are cost-effective to buy and easy for users to fill. The smartest ones can integrate with other business systems by API or via custom app for legacy systems. The most popular ones are designed, hosted and supported in Australia, so compliance with Australian regulations, data security and ongoing support are assured. This is your best option if adaptability, value and peace of mind are key drivers.

How Formlify can help your Education Institution

Easy operation and full control for your staff:

• Intuitive ‘drag and drop’ forms creation, without the need for coding or help from IT
• Unlimited fields, statuses, logic flows and vertical layouts, including your corporate branding
• Advanced workflows linked to forms, giving you infinite control, variety and flexibility
• Conditional logic so staff or customers see simpler forms, with only fields relevant to them
• Notifications sent based on form submission, state changes or workflow step.

Convenience and confidence for your students:

• Forms that are attractive, intuitive, and easy and fast to fill
• Ability to partially fill forms via smart mobile devices, and return later to complete them
• Ability to add images, notes or signatures to your forms, so you can complete the picture
• Marking of sections as confidential or redacted (such as credit card details) so privacy is preserved and PII/PCI requirements are met
• Integration with your payment gateway to make payments easy for students

Control and peace of mind for your IT and management teams:

• CIBIS provides integration with EDMS, API integration with other business systems, and custom software for integration with legacy systems
• Formlify’s workflows make compliance automatic and assured
• Formlify offers value for money, with no limit to the number of forms published; you only pay for forms received
• Peace of mind from knowing that design, hosting and support is taken care of by a trusted, long term, local provider
• Formlify provides your institution with the capacity and flexibility to quickly adapt to changed circumstances or take advantage of new opportunities in the market.

If Formlify sounds like the advanced, flexible, cost-effective online form builder you’ve been looking for to streamline your operations, please contact CIBIS.