Form Management System (FMS) 2.0

The CEHD Form Management System (FMS) is a set of web-based tools to facilitate the collection of data via the web by CEHD faculty, staff, and students. FMS will collect data from any HTML form and store the data in a private location associated with a FMS account. The data can then be browsed through the web or downloaded to a tab-delimited text file that is compatible with Excel, SPSS, or most similar data oriented applications. FMS was developed in April, 2000 in order to allow non-programmers to gather data through the web and has been used by faculty to collect data from students; several research groups to collect research related data from people who were both internal and external to the university; graduate students collecting dissertation data; and, college staff collecting data from current and former students.

The basic package is available (without charge) to any CEHD faculty member, staff member, or student. This includes a FMS account and a brief demo of how to setup forms. After that, you are on your own.

Examples:

Customized extensions to FMS have been done for special projects. These types of customized solutions require programmer time and would require a separate agreement that would most likely include monetary remuneration for services. Contact Arlen Strader (strader@tamu.edu ) to make an appointment if you would like to discuss such an arrangement.

Examples of customized extensions:

  • a voting scheme where each person was only allowed to vote once, but the person's name was not directly tied to the vote.
  • a login mechanism that allowed a person to submit data and then return at a later time to complete or update the submitted information.
  • automatic emails where different people were notified based upon the answers provided.

The way it works. You create a web form using your favorite web page editor (eg. DreamWeaver, FrontPage) and then point your form at FMS to collect the data. You then use FMS to organize and retreive the data. In particular,

  1. Create a web form/survey/questionaire using your favorite web page authoring program.
  2. Setup FMS and your form.
(Instructions are available for these steps for some web editors.)

These steps are all that is required to collect data. However, before opening up your form for use, you should test if thoroughly to make sure that the data for all form fields is stored properly. More advanced options are available, but not required.

You can access FMS as a guest (guest account: username=formuser, password=guest) Or, contact Computer Support via (help@coe.tamu.edu) to have a personal account created. Anyone directly associated with the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M may use this system for college-related activities.
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