One of the first projects that I was tasked with when starting at AFA Protective Systems was to build a software platform capable of housing a single PDF document in a way that users could fill it out without being able to touch the template. Since then Forms has grown from housing just one to about ten different forms, some of which require dynamic construction, as well as several other applications which assist in AFA’s day-to-day operations.
screenshot of a form
Although not limited to these specific roles, most users of Forms can be categorized into one of two groups: sales and technicians. Field Technicians are currently granted access to inspection and service work order forms documents. Using Forms, technicians can easily and effectively fill out documents, have customers sign and submit the forms to the office right from the iPad. Forms event helps pre-populate fields that the technician might otherwise have left empty.
Demonstrates sales access to NFPA Forms and training portal.
Sales staff have a few more useful applications. Like technicians they are able to fill out specialized forms for submitting job proposals and filing NFPA submissions, but they are also granted access to a customer portal that will allow they to view a full history of all work that was performed for a customer. Information ranging from locations and contact information, alarm histories, bill summary and submitted documents can all easily be looked up in a simplified way that was not possible prior to the development of Forms. To ensure security against theft of devices, sales staff are only granted access to a very small set of customers that had been approved by upper management. Sales also have access to a lease calculator which will calculate the cost advantages for leasing vs owning our equipment over set intervals of time.
Forms features an access-control system which can regulate users access to specific forms and apps on the site based on a pairing of group- and user- access levels. The groups access levels allows administrators to share similar applications among a large set of users without the need of manually granting each user the application privileges they need to perform their job. User access levels, are more specialized in that they will grant permissions on top of the Group level access they have already been permitted. Users level access permissions can even be used to take away access to a particular system that they would normally be granted in the case that they are found to be untrustworthy or simply do not need that level of control.
Lease calculator for sales staff
The current design of access-control did not always exists however. This design evolved into its current form after several revisions of the system had taken place. Since the web application was only initially supposed to house a single PDF document that would be shared by all employees in the company, the original release of Forms did not feature any access control outside of a users account. As more documents were entered into the system, the need for more specialized branch level was desired. Each user would belong to a Branch which would have its own set of documents branded with specific locations. Eventually as the application began to move away from simply storing documents to also containing applications that interface with our Alarm Billing/Monitoring systems, a more sophisticated design was needed which would not only regulate access of apps stored within Forms but also with access controls within other applications as well. This lead to the creation of the current design explained above.
To date Forms has proven to be an invaluable application to the companies operation and plans are currently in the works to incorporate more systems within it to better meet the needs of our employees and customers.