Want to digitize your vapor intrusion field data, but haven’t found a simple solution to do this?
XForms can help you out with that.
One of the big advantages of a generic forms tool like XForms when compared to dedicated environmental data management systems is that it’s flexible. You can build any kind of form in XForms. Literally any.kind.of.form. And this includes vapor intrusion management systems (VIMS) forms. For example, VIMS Inspections and Sub-Slab Air Sampling forms.
And these forms are not hard to build. In fact, you can build them yourself in a matter of a few hours. You don’t have to put in a request to the software developers to build them for you, wait days if not weeks, work your way through revision after revision with the software developers, or pay big money to get it done. Just DIY.
How to build a VIMS Inspection form on your own in XForms
If you want to give this a go on your own, start with using the XForms form template Designer tool. It’s pretty easy to figure out…you don’t need to be a web designer to figure this thing out. Here’s a screenshot of what the Designer looks like:
At first sight, this Designer tool might look a little intimidating. But trust me on this…after an hour of training by us, you will get it and become proficient at building any kind of form your heart (or company) desires, even VIMS forms 🙂
Here’s a quickie video of me clicking around the VIMS Inspection form that Mid-Atlantic Associates uses on a fairly regular basis for their vapor intrusion clients:
And here’s what that form looks like when being used on an iPhone in the field:
And once you build this form (or any kind of form for that matter), you can do pretty neat things with it. For example:
- You can create an integration that automatically dumps PDFs of each of the submitted forms into OneDrive
- You can create an integration that also automatically dumps all the photos into a photos folder in OneDrive, Sharepoint, Teams, Slack etc.
- You can have the forms be emailed to the project manager, automatically
- You can export all of the form data directly to Excel
- you can create an integraiton to dump all of the form data to AirTable, Google Sheets, or any web-based spreadsheet tool of oyur choice.
- These are just examples…the list is endless of what you can do once you digitize this stuff.
Here’s a short video clip of an integration between XForms and Sharepoint that was created for Mid-Atlantic Associates.
Not rocket science, and not expensive either
So there you have it. Building these forms is not rocket science:
- You don’t have to engage (with big $) with your software developer for weeks to build and ultimately get these sorts of forms in good enough working order to actually use them—successfully—in the field.
- You can learn how to build your own forms fairly quickly…the Designer tool is not rocket science or difficult to figure out quickly.
- you can edit these as your needs change…again, without having to contact your developer to tweak them for you (at additional cost)
- You can build anything you want to build. You are not limited to whatever Earthsoft, QNOPY, SampleServe, or others have developed…after all, everyone’s needs is kind of unique.
What does this cost?
At XForms, we use a per user per month billing model currently pegged at $25/user/month. So if you had 5 people using XForms, the total fee for this system would be $125 per month. While not free, most firms can afford $125 per month for a system that automates a lot of mundane things, frees up your staff’s time to do more important things, doesn’t make mistakes, keeps things consistent, and ultimately costs less than the payroll hit to do this manually with your own staff.
Want to chat with us about your VIMS forms?
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