Adobe FormsCentral

» see formscentral.acrobat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

adobe formscentral sat in the enterprise SaaS lane where i was never a paying user. i had acrobat reader on every windows and mac i touched from 2000 onward, and by the time acrobat xi pro was on office machines in 2013 i was working in perception-heavy computer vision and did not build customer forms for a living. formscentral was in the acrobat xi bundle. i opened it once out of curiosity and closed it out of the same.

the product launched on 15 february 2011 as a standalone hosted service. adobe wanted a piece of the online-forms category that jotform, wufoo, and formstack had opened and that google forms was in the middle of taking. formscentral let you build a form in a wysiwyg editor, distribute it as a link or embed, collect responses into a hosted table, and export the whole thing to pdf, excel, or a database dump. the pricing tiers ran from free to a small monthly fee per author.

on 15 october 2012 adobe shipped acrobat xi pro, which bundled the formscentral desktop authoring tool as the replacement for livecycle designer. that was the moment formscentral got a real distribution channel. livecycle had been the enterprise pdf-forms tool through the acrobat 9 and 10 era, and pulling it out in favor of a hosted service was a bet on cloud form-collection being where the market was going. the bet was correct about the market. it was not correct about adobe being the company the market would buy from.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

formscentral had two surfaces. the browser SaaS at formscentral.acrobat.com is where authors built and hosted forms. the desktop authoring tool inside acrobat xi pro is where power users composed forms that could be exported as pdf or connected to the hosted service. the pdf export was the piece adobe was uniquely good at, because the pdf form standard was theirs and the rendering was reliable across every reader. that was formscentral's differentiator against jotform, and it turned out not to matter, because most small businesses in 2014 wanted a web-native form on a phone screen, not a printable pdf.

~ the day it ended ~

adobe announced the retirement in january 2015 with a six-month notice. the reason given in the announcement was that demand had not materialized at the level adobe had modeled. formscentral stopped accepting new signups on 28 january 2015. authoring inside acrobat xi pro was removed via an update. paid subscribers got a prorated refund. the service went dark on 28 july 2015, and all response data that authors had not exported before that date was deleted. jotform ran a public import tool for six months to catch the migration and reported bringing in more than ten thousand forms. that was the size of the formscentral installed base at end of life. small enough that adobe did not want to keep the servers on. large enough that jotform got a real cohort of new customers from the wind-down.

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