CMS Forms (Orbeon) Manual

The CMS Forms Service is a service offering from Government Digital Experience (GDX) that allows ministries to develop online forms integrated into the government website. Ministries can enroll in the service to create modern, consistent experiences for citizens.

About this manual

Orbeon is a well-documented and continually changing application with a large user community. It is also very robust and complex, so trying to maintain a full and comprehensive manual is both difficult and redundant. This manual focuses on using Orbeon in our government and systems context.

This manual should be used along with these additional resources:

Releases

Orbeon release notes

Here are the most recent release notes for the Orbeon application. We are currently running version 2020.1.3 of Orbeon.

Note that we will occassionally skip versions in favour of cumulative builds, so not every version of Orbeon released is applied to our environments.

CMS Forms release notes

Here are the most recent release notes for internal modifications to the Orbeon application features, functions or infrastructure. These are separate from the CMS Lite application releases and are usually done independently.

Our application went live just a couple of months before the pandemic started. In the flurry of work that followed we were inconsistent in our tracking and documentation of improvements and releases, in part due to support system and process changes. Rather than back-track all the work completed, we’re logging new releases effective April 1, 2022.

Forms manual release notes

Here are the most recent release notes for this manual. Subscribe to this page (right) to be informed of updates.

  • 2022.1 | November 16 (release of Orbeon 2021.1.5)
  • 2022.0 | August 1, 2022 (initial non-beta release)