WASHINGTON, D.C. - Electronic forms aren't the most exciting technology inside the U.S. Air Force, especially with F-22 Raptor fighter jets and B-2 Spirit bombers to consider. But when 18,000 different forms and 700,000 end users are involved, e-forms become a real priority - so much so that the Air Force is spending $6.7 million to overhaul its obsolete forms system.

Converting existing static forms - which include everything from personnel and travel requests to logistics and financial transactions - to smarter, Web-based versions will make the process of accessing, filling out and sending forms much easier for Air Force personnel worldwide, says Carolyn Watkins-Taylor, director of the Air Force's departmental publishing office.

In addition to streamlined forms creation, the Air Force gains better management capabilities and increased employee productivity. The publishing office hasn't conducted a formal cost-savings analysis, but if the new system saves every person in the Air Force community just 30 minutes per year of time-consuming data entry, that's a $9 million savings annually, Watkins-Taylor says.

"And we think we can do even better than that," she says. "We're looking at it conservatively."

The electronic forms overhaul is part of a broader content management effort to modernize Air Force publishing that includes Web-enabling technical manuals and deploying XML databases. For the $6.7 million forms component, the Air Force is using XML-based information management software from PureEdge Solutions.

PureEdge's Internet Commerce System (ICS) lets users create, capture, process and archive secure XML e-forms using the Internet. A simple but crucial feature of PureEdge ICS is that it bundles all elements of a transaction in one file and stores it in one database - the form template and the underlying data stay together in a nonproprietary XML format.

With the old JetForm FormFlow system that the Air Force used, the form and the data were separate elements, and users had to save multiple files to archive just one electronic form. People kept losing their data, Watkins-Taylor says. To get around difficult archiving processes, people would often print out completed forms and later redo them rather than try to find a saved version, she says.