OnBase forms often sit at the center of critical business processes, yet many teams struggle with a fundamental question: when should you use Unity Forms, and when is an Image Form the better choice?
Principal Consultant Cailen Myers will create both a Unity Form and an Image Form in real time, showing exactly how each is configured and specific use cases for each.
Cailen will walk through the strengths and tradeoffs of both options. She’ll compare how they handle data capture, workflow interaction, reporting, user experience, and long-term maintenance, helping attendees understand how to choose between them.
Session attendees will see how to:
- Build a Unity Form from the ground up
- Configure an Image Form
- Evaluate the pros and cons of each form type based on reporting needs
- Identify common decision points that determine which approach is the right fit
Whether you are launching new forms or reevaluating existing configurations, this session will provide the guidance you need to apply to your own OnBase environment.
Transcript
Cailen Myers
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar on how to choose between Unity Forms and Image Forms.
My name is Cailen Myers, and I am thrilled to have you here with us today. I am a principal consultant for RPI. In the next 30 minutes, we are going to walk through choosing between Unity Forms and Image Forms, going through some pros and cons, and also how to build them.
A few housekeeping items though before we get started. I definitely want to hear from you. However, we do have to keep these lines muted. Please throw in any questions & comments in the Q &A chat, and we will get to them at the end of this webinar. Let’s go ahead and get started. I’m going to start off first with some information for you all.
Today, we are going to review our Unity forms, our image forms, some terms. Of course, we’re going to do some building, a little bit of a demo, pros and cons, and we’ll finish up with those questions and answers.
What is a Unity form? Unity forms allow you to easily create an electronic form. You can use the Unity Designer, which is in the OnBase Unity Client. Like most things in OnBase, it has that point and click interface to make creating those Unity forms just simple and easy for both OnBase admins and even if you want to let some of your super users configure those as well.
You do not need a lot of technical experience to create those, which allows you to give that access to those super users if you choose.
And then of course you can link things like keywords, autofills and things like that with these Unity forms and send them through workflow for routing and approvals.
Some of the benefits of using a Unity form is that you can facilitate form completion by automatically populating existing data and providing that user-friendly interface that you’re all familiar with. It eliminates any type of costly mistakes by doing that validating of data upon the entry or even submitting on the forms. It will shorten cycle times because you’re eliminating that routing of paper.
And then, of course, like I said, it does have that intuitive designer, so you can create your forms pretty quickly. You can also create templates, so that way you can use more of a repeated template to create multiple forms.
Another key feature of our Unity forms is that you leverage the OnBase platform to provide highly configurable forms that are easy for the user experience. They fully integrate with OnBase workflows, so you can improve that data capture and support those complex processes that you have. You can utilize features like the Autofill keyword sets, keyword data sets, and OnBase workflows. This of course minimizes the rekeying of values.
It also provides form side logic and calculations with custom actions and calculated fields, which we’ll look at a few of those during the demo. And then lastly, Unity Forms does support form signing with any type of touchscreen device or signature pad. You of course can also sign with your finger or your mouse. However, I’m sure you all know signing your name with a mouse is not very easy to see or legible, but it is an option if you choose to go that route.
And then the other forms that we’re looking at today are our Image forms. Image forms is basically a replicate of our paper forms. You’re creating an electronic version of a paper form. This does allow accessibility to an e-form and eliminates some frustrating issues when you’re trying to duplicate an actual paper form.
This is built on the same platform as our Unity forms. Image forms are easily configurable and you can do things like your custom actions, your signatures, and your calculated fields.
So again, let’s discuss some benefits with our Image forms. This does facilitate form completion, again, similar to our Unity forms, by automatically populating that existing data and providing that user-friendly interface. It eliminates those costly mistakes by validating that data upon the entry or submission, shortens your life cycles by eliminating that physical routing of the paper.
It supports the processes that rely on regulated forms by providing an electronic image of that form. Any type of government form or any form that doesn’t belong to your organization, you can still turn that into an electronic form and it can still be accepted by those organizations. And then again, it utilizes that intuitive designer, so you can create these form templates quickly and easily.
A key feature of our image forms is that we have that exact look of that regulated form, and we’re just mapping our data fields to the actual image of that form. We are leveraging our OnBase form platform. As such, they are highly configurable forms that enhance that end user experience.
It is fully integrated with our OnBase workflow. We’re improving those data captures and those complex processes, just like on our Unity forms. You can utilize those popular features again. The autofill keyword sets, keyword data sets, on-base workflows, which will populate those fields with those existing data, minimizing re-keying of values, and routing, of course, for approval.
We have our custom actions and our calculated fields, just like our Unity forms. And again, we also can do the signatures on our image forms. There are a lot of terms when we discuss forms, both Unity and image forms. There are quite a few screens we’re going to go through to talk about those forms. I’m going to go through them kind of quickly because I want to get to the demo.
But if there are any questions, please refer back to this PowerPoint in this webinar. Or feel free to look at the Hyland MRGs. All the information is in there or of course, always feel free to reach out to us at RPI.
Let’s go ahead and get started with some of our terms. Something you may hear me talk about during our demo is our actual designer. That is the ribbon across the top of your screen that contains all your buttons and actions. Things like creating our new form templates, opening an existing one, publishing our templates, test driving, adding pages, things like that are all in the top designer ribbon.
Along the left-hand side of our designer is something called a toolbox. That window contains all our form controls that can be added to a form by clicking on them and then dragging them into the area on the actual form where you want to design that particular control.
Also, we have things like properties. Our property tabs tab will contain all the properties that are defined by the visual display of a control. Each control has different property options. We’ll look at that a little bit while we’re designing. There are also our form properties that contain all the properties of the form itself, such as a template name and the theme. You can always rename these or change the theme at any point.
We have our pointer, so that is what we’re using to select our form fields for editing, deleting, things like that. There is an attachment in our toolbox that allows you to insert the attachment controls so users can upload forms onto our Unity form interface.
If you choose to have a barcode populate some information, you can go ahead and scan or take a picture of that barcode to use it as a barcode reader to then populate form fields.
Our calculated fields, which we’ve talked about a little bit about when listing some of the benefits, allow you to calculate some of the different form fields on your Unity forms and Image forms. There’s the CAPTCHA, the controls that verify that it is a person actually filling out the form.
We have things like condition buttons. If you insert that condition button control, that can be used in conjunction with when you click a condition button. That allows you to do a custom action. We have things like checkboxes, drawings, images, all the keyword type groups you all should be familiar with as an OnBase admin.
Those are also items that you can put on your image forms and Unity forms. There is a lookup button. So that’s the same idea. You can do a lookup for any of your autofill keyword sets. You can also add things like multi-line text boxes. This allows you to add a larger box to insert any type of text lines.
It does contain a scroll bar, and you can tell on these how many lines to display right from the get-go. We have things like nested tables that can be used when a list of items has several items associated with it. Each top-level list item can have a secondary list item that’s associated with it. However, the nested tables do not use keyword types or keyword type group fields.
Our panels are a nice way to keep things organized. You can set multiple panels on a page, and we’ll look at that when configuring our Unity forms today. Things like paragraph, which is just a way to insert some additional information. It’s not any type of input that the users have to fill out, it’s more just adding information onto a form.
You can also insert a print button. You do need to have those print functions set up on whatever device you’re using. Keep that in mind if you’re doing something like a mobile device for these forms. A print button may not be a viable option.
Of course, we have our radio buttons, repeating sections, tables, text boxes. A text box is similar to a multi-line text box. The text box just allows for one line instead of a large block of space.
We have properties that are system property controls. You’ll also notice, I did not go through the property terms, but there are property terms such as created by, stored date, document date, things like that. So again, I would recommend referencing a module reference guide or reaching out if you’re looking for more information on what those all are.
What I would like to do now is jump in and start building our Unity form first, and then we can go ahead and do the Image form afterwards. I just want to note that I have already created our document types and our keywords and our autofills just to reduce some of the time we’re spending on this build. Again, if you have questions on how to set those items up, please feel free to reach out and we would be happy to help you with that.
Without further ado, let me go ahead and switch over to my Unity client. Both our OnBase Unity forms and Image forms are all done in our OnBase Unity client, so I have already logged in. I am an OnBase admin, so I do have access to my files up here, my administration, and my form designer.
You’ll notice my designer here is my ribbon that we outlined while discussing our terms. We can go ahead and create a new form, open an existing form, or we can edit some of our themes. We’re going to go ahead and do create.
Now from here, you have the option to create a Unity form, which is what we’re going to start off with when creating an Image form.
I’m going to leave Unity form highlighted, which is in this light blue color. My form type is going to be a document. I’m going to select system documents for today for this demonstration. I’m actually going to do a time-off request.
Template, which is the name of the form itself. And then a theme. Right now, you’ll notice the default is a modern gray. I can hit this dropdown and change my theme. If you know me, you know I love coffee. So, I usually select the coffee theme for demonstration purposes. Of course, you probably want to select a theme with your organization’s colors or create a theme that would meet your organization’s colors. I’m going to go ahead and hit OK.
It may take a second to load. This is what the form looks like so far. I have my form name up here, which is my time-off, and it automatically adds a submit button. You can always remove the submit button and add it yourself. Along the left-hand side is this toolbar or toolbox we were talking about. You’ll notice I have my pointer selected, which is just allowing me to move my mouse, and then I have all those controls.
If I continue to scroll down, I have my keywords that are associated with my time-off request document type. And then here’s those properties I talked about, you know, created by, date store, document date, things like that. Let’s go ahead and get started. I want to add a section on my form. So, I’m going to go ahead and select section, hold down my mouse, drag it on over. Now I have my currently untitled section.
Down here, you’ll notice I have my properties. So, I’m going to go ahead and change my label to say employee information. The nice thing is that automatically updates on your screen. You can now see in that red box, it says employee information. And then you’ll notice I have my cursor on something called ID, and it says section six. As you add sections, panels, or text boxes, OnBase will automatically give those an ID as well as a number.
I strongly suggest you change that ID to something that makes sense, so if you’re ever doing any custom actions, you will know what you’re selecting. I’m going to change this to employee info section. I can tell OnBase to expand it automatically or have it collapse when you open it, allow it to be collapsible, make it read-only, make it secure, only allow certain user groups to see it, so on and so forth.
Here’s my section. I’m now going to go ahead and add a panel. I want to do three columns to have my employee information. I’m going to tell OnBase the width of each of those panels. Considering there’s three, I’m going to make it as close to equaling 100 as possible. I usually do 33 apiece, because that will give me a total width of 99. I have my column selected again. And then we can decide our column width and hit OK.
You’ll also notice there’s an option here to duplicate the panel layout. If you have multiple panels you want to add, you can just go ahead and hit duplicate. And you’ll see that I have a second panel here. If I do not want that panel, I just click that red X and I can remove it and hit OK. And then now in this panel information, I want to add my keywords, right? I want to know what kind of time off we’re doing and who we’re doing it for. I’m going to go ahead and add my employee ID, my employee’s last name, and then my employee’s first name.
Again, if I click on employee ID I have my control type, which is a text box. I have my label, which is employee ID, but I can always change this and say you know please enter your employee ID. I can change my ID on the form, and in this case employee ID 11 is fine. I don’t really need the 11 there, but employee ID pretty much sums up what this box is. Then, my display size. It automatically defaults to zero. I’m going to go ahead and change this to 50 and hit tab. Now, you’ll see my box is a lot larger and takes up that space. I think it looks just a little bit nicer.
Then my employee ID number in my AMBE system is an autofill, so I’m going to go ahead and hit this pencil next to my autofill. I’m going to hit my dropdown list, and I’m going to select my employee info autofill. Now, you may have other autofills in your system, but you, of course, are only going to see the autofills that work with your employee ID keyword. So, you’re not going to get the entire list unless you have that employee ID keyword on that autofill.
It also will allow you to create an autofill record. Let’s just say maybe you type an employee ID number that isn’t in your autofill. This will allow you to go ahead and add that. I don’t want to do that right now, so I’m going to go ahead and hit finish. And then another thing I want to note on here is down at the bottom, we can make this read only, which I do not suggest doing because we want somebody to fill it out.
But we can make it required, which I do want to do. So when I hit require, you’ll now notice there is a red asterisk next to the right of my title. And then I’m going to do the same thing for the next two boxes. I want to do employee last name for this box. I want to make this read-only, because I want this information to come from my autofill. I don’t want my users to fill it out. And I want to make this a little bit larger, that way it’s all uniform and looks the same. Then, I’m going to do the same thing with my first name. I’m going to add the word employee, and I’m going to make my display 50. I’m also going to make this read only. I’m going to go ahead and delete this submit button, and I’m going to add a new submit button right on my form itself, so right here.
Now I’m going to do a custom action. If I select custom action, I can go ahead down to the bottom here and select new. I recommend that you make your custom action name as intuitive as possible. In the description, again, I would make it as helpful as possible for your OnBase admins to understand what this button is and what this custom action is doing. And then we’re going to go ahead and hit add.
You’ll notice you have quite a few options for your custom action. I’m going to say if field is empty or not empty, I’m going to hit OK. Now my field, like I said in my name and in my description is my employee ID, so I’m going to find my field. This is why it’s important to really name your ID something that makes sense, because it is just ID 11. You wouldn’t know what that is.
Now that this says employee ID, I know that this is the field I’m looking for. If my employee ID is empty, I’m going to do an add down here at the bottom in my action section. If my employee ID is empty, I’m going to either hide or share or show my submit button. I’m going to hit this change element visibility. Again, you have tons of options to choose from.
My element is going to be my submit button. You’ll notice here there’s tons of items on here to pick from because we didn’t rename our panels. This is our form ourselves, headers, things like that. So I have my submit button right here. If my ID is empty, I want to hide my submit button. Here in the middle, there’s a reverse action checked.
That is basically saying if employee ID is not empty, go ahead and share my submit button. This just allows the reverse to happen. You don’t always want to have that checked. It just depends on what custom action you’re creating. I’m going to go ahead and hit OK. And then I’m going to just do a test drive so you all can see what this form looks like. Then we can move on to our image format for this.
So in our test drive, here’s our form. Our ID is empty. Our submit button is missing. Along the side, we have some options to say like if the form is new or not, if the form is in a workflow queue or not, if I’m a different user, how do I want to fill out this form? This is a really good way to test if you are somebody who shouldn’t have access to a form.
I’m going to go ahead and type in an employee ID number. I’m going to hit tab. The first name and last name appeared, and I now have that submit button. I can go ahead and hit submit and it’s going to tell me here’s the information that just got filled out for my form.
That looks good. What I recommend is these forms can be accessed externally or internally, depending on how you want them set up. If you are going to make these forms external, I highly suggest you do not use any type of autofills that would have any type of personal information on them. Because if I were to go in here and I type in something incorrectly, like my employee ID number, and hit tab, now I can see all of Bruce’s information inside of Cailen Myers’.
So again, just be very cautious when you are doing any of these forms, what information you are sharing with your people who are filling out these forms. I’m going to go ahead and hit close on that. My form tested okay. There are a few things I need to do next.
I’m going to publish this form. OnBase will always ask for a comment when you go to publish the form. I recommend as a best practice to go ahead and put in the dates that you made this change and then a brief explanation of what you did because you can always go back to older versions. If you just say updated form, that doesn’t help you. But if you say updated form to make employee ID number visible, that helps you understand what you did with this last change.
So, I created new ML form. As soon as I hit publish, I now have the form available. A few things to share quickly is about form visibility. This tells OnBase who you can share the form with or who can view or create the form. So, you know, we can make it our OnBase admins. We can do a view only group. It’s kind of a bad name for it, but whatever the case may be, you can add those groups and hit save.
You can also share this form so users do not have to log into the Unity client or web client. You can share this form with just a URL internally or externally, depending how you set that up. If you go to share form, it’s going to ask for your server information and your data source. You can do fixed credentials. So maybe you want to use something called time-off user with a username and password, or you don’t check that box and individuals that have to sign in using their OnBase account to fill out this form.
Target URL. Once the users hit submit on this form, you can actually then send them to a different webpage. If it’s an internal webpage or maybe just a page that you created that says thank you for your form, thank you for your submission, whatever the case may be. You’ll notice as I start typing in some of this information, it won’t let me do it because I don’t have a lot of information in here right now, so let me just type in the name.
As you start typing it in, I have to put in the server to see it though. It will start giving you the URL here to share with your users. And then you hit this copy button, and that will provide them that URL. So that is how you create a Unity form.
Let’s go ahead over and do an Image form. Because I changed my form visibility, I do want to publish this form again. Great, so I’m going to hit publish. As soon as that publishes, I’m going to go ahead and hit create. I’m now going to select my Image form. Again, we’re just going to do all system documents.
In my Image form, I’m going to go ahead and select the I9. I’m going to go ahead and call this I9. An Image form is a little bit different because like we talked about, it’s a basically a duplicate of a form. With the Image form, I’m going to need to select a background image. I’m going to hit this pencil. And I don’t have a form already in here, but I’m going to go ahead and show you how to upload a form. I’m going to hit this import button here and go to my desktop here and grab the I9 form.
An I9 is a government form. It’s something I cannot recreate as a Unity form, so this is why I am making an Image form. One thing to note is that Image forms do have to be in a PNG file format, so make sure you have that form saved that way or you will not be able to use it. You’re going to want to give it a description so once you have all that done you can go ahead and hit import. Any time you import a document in OnBase, you’ll get that preview window. I’m just going to close my document import window.
In here, I’m going to go ahead and find my I-9. You can do it by search or just type it in. I did one already today, so here is my I-9 form. I’m going to go ahead and select it. Then you’ll notice we have the form here. We have our keywords, so first name, last name, social.
Let’s go ahead and start adding these boxes on the form. One thing I want to call out, you’ll notice in our toolbox, we do not have nearly as many options as we did on our Unity form. I’m going to type, I’m going to click my first name, hold down my left mouse click, drag it, and I’m going to go ahead and drag it in this first name box on this form. I’m going to go ahead and expand it, just kind of holding down my mouse. Same thing for my last name. I’m going to go ahead and drag it over here.
You kind of have to get it in the right spot. I’m going to drag it to make it a little bit longer. My last name I want to make required. I’m going to go ahead and hit that box to make it required. I’m going to go ahead and select my first name box. I also want to make that required. We can add our social security number in here.
And then we have some of these checkboxes here. Let’s add some checkboxes. I’m now just dragging that box right there. I’m going to do another checkbox and drag it right there. You’ll notice though this says check one of the following. With the checkboxes, you can’t set it up in OnBase right out of the box to only allow you to check one. You would have to add a custom action, right? So, checkbox one is checked. Don’t allow them to check two, three or four. Those are some of the caveats or differences with using Image forms versus Unity forms.
We do have some signatures down here. So again, I can add signature fields. Right here in this box. You’ll notice our signature field has kind of taken over the form, so I need to change my height. Now you’ll see that as I’m going lower, my height is changing. However, now I’m not in that box anymore.
I’ll have to go ahead and grab my signature box again and move it down where I want it. Make it just a tad bit smaller. And then I need to make the width smaller as well, because I’m in my date signature spot, so I want to change that.So again, very similar to a Unity form, only you have fewer toolbox options to choose from.
I want to call out here, I made first name and last name required, but you do not see that red asterisk. Again, I have these check boxes and unless I create a custom action, OnBase is going to let me check them all. Our social security number, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. It doesn’t necessarily completely line up with those boxes. I also put dashes in, which this keyword doesn’t want the dashes.
And then here’s our signature box. I’m going to have to use a mouse because I’m on a computer. Those are a few things to keep in mind. The signature box is kind of over where that signature font is at, so we need to move our box down a little bit. We need to create some custom actions for these checkboxes, do a little additional formatting with our social security number.
And again, we don’t have really that visual to see that these boxes are required. Image forms are really nice because you can fill out these government forms. Just keep in mind, you do have some limitations with those. I’m going to go ahead and close this now. Again, I can publish this form. You’ll notice once you publish the form, then your form visibility will display. So let me go ahead and publish my form.
Perfect, okay, so we have our form. Now we have our form visibility. We can share our form, things like that. That’s all we’re going to share today for our form build. Thank you very much for being part of that. And if you have questions on anything that we went over with the form build, Unity forms or Image forms, again, please feel free to reach out.
I know we’re getting a little low on time here, so let me just finish up our last few slides. We completed our build. Let’s just talk about a couple pros and cons here with our Unity Forms and our Image Forms. Our pros for Unity Forms, design it the way you want it, right? We have those theme colors. You can put things anywhere you want. Panel sections, repeating sections, things like that. Of course, with anything electronic, you’re going to go ahead and save on those paper costs.
As I mentioned, you can make these forms completable internally or externally. Again, just keep in mind if you are doing it externally, remember who your viewers are. Don’t allow them to see other people’s personal information. And then you have those toolbox features available to you when you’re filling or creating those Unity forms or image forms. You have that exact replica of the paper, right? You just are filling out that paper form and adding those controls on top of it, so you can submit your government forms in that required format.
You’re still reducing your paper costs because it is electronic. You can fill these out internally or externally as well. And then you do have those toolbox features available for filling out the form. And before we go to those cons, I just wanted to show you that visual again of our toolbox features and our Unity forms versus our Image forms. So again, you can see that the Image forms are a lot.
We have some limitations of what we can add on those forms because we are taking that replica of a paper form or a government form. The cons, of course, are that you cannot convert an I9 into a Unity form because the government will not accept it. So, a lot of those forms that don’t belong to your organization, you cannot go ahead and just rebuild them as a Unity form because they probably will not be accepted.
And then for our Image forms, like I shared on that last screen, we don’t have all those toolbox options. Things like the required fields are not easily visible, and your file format to do your image form does need to be a PNG. You’ll notice sometimes that means the form is going to be kind of blurry, depending on how you scan it in or convert it. There are no radio button options, and you’re going to do a lot more with some custom actions to make kind of those check boxes to allow somebody only select one or two or things like that.
If you haven’t already, please go ahead and type in any of your questions that you may have now in the question and answer box. I know we’re running out of time, so I’m going to try to answer as many as I can. But any of them that we don’t get to, we will follow up with you, either myself or somebody else here at RPI.
This webinar is available to watch at any time, of course, or you can always reference your module reference guides, or reach out to us here at RPI if you have additional questions.
First one is, if you have Unity forms, do you need a license for Image forms? So Unity forms and Image forms are separate licenses. It does kind of depend on if you’re on the simplified licensing module or the old licensing module, but either way, these are separate modules and you need different licenses for them.
Is there any other software needed for on-base forms? You need to build these out in the Unity client, so you will definitely need a Unity server or a Unity application pull set up.
Can both of these forms be accessed externally? So yes, you most certainly can make them available externally if you have your on-base environment or at least a Unity server in your DMZ so you allow outside traffic.
And we have time for just one more, which is when did Unity Forms become available? So Hyland released the on-base Unity Forms in OnBase 11. I think that was probably around like April of 2011. They’ve made many enhancements since then and are still making enhancements. I know the Image Forms came out quite a few years after that.
That’s all the time that we have left right now. Again, if there’s any questions that I didn’t get to, one of us here at RPI will definitely reach out to you.
For any other additional questions, if you’d like a personalized demo or to talk about some of the things we mentioned today, please feel free to send us an email at questions@rpic.com.
I want to thank everyone again for joining us today. Like I said, questions, demos, send us that email and otherwise have a really great day. Thank you, everyone.
