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By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available. InfoPath 2007's improved ties to Visual Studio and SharePoint, along with support for browser-based forms, give the product new relevance for developers. The new features could draw developers who were intrigued by InfoPath's support for XML and related document formats, but who were turned off by its poor support for key Microsoft developer technologies such as Visual Studio. However, InfoPath remains one of many options for creating forms-based applications. 2003 Release Missed the Mark InfoPath is a tool for designing and filling out electronic forms that use XML as the primary way to describe both the form and the associated data. It provides a familiar, Office-like interface and allows offline data entry, something not possible with Web-based forms. With InfoPath, forms designers could do many customization tasks, such as simple validation of user input, without writing any code or script. However, despite being introduced with great fanfare as part of Office 2003, InfoPath hasn't been as popular as Microsoft had hoped. The reasons include the following: Focused on information workers, not developers. Microsoft positioned InfoPath as a tool that office workers would use to design their own forms. Although nearly all information workers are familiar with forms—both electronic and paper—designing an electronic form is more like programming, because it requires the designer to consider issues such as how data is represented in back-end systems. Furthermore, even though InfoPath goes to great lengths to offer an easy-to-use form designer, the XML underpinnings are still visible, and most information workers are likely to have only a casual understanding of XML, if any at all. Out of step with the developer platform. Even though InfoPath was initially targeted at information workers, it caught the eye of some IT developers because of its in-depth support for XML. But those developers were disappointed to find that the product didn't support key Microsoft developer products, such as Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. For example, although many InfoPath forms can be customized without requiring developers to write form-specific code, in the cases in which custom code was required, developers initially had to use older programming technologies based on COM and scripting languages such as JScript and VBScript. At the same time, Microsoft's developer division was strongly encouraging developers to move to the .NET Framework and languages such as C# and VB.NET. Support for the .NET Framework and its languages didn't come until the 2004 release of InfoPath 2003 SP1. InfoPath required to design and use forms. Perhaps the most significant limitation of InfoPath was the requirement that users have InfoPath installed on their systems to fill out a form. Requiring the full client makes InfoPath more expensive than browser-based solutions for corporate developers and rules it out completely for many government projects, which must support a broad range of operating systems. Becoming a Developer Tool With the 2007 release, InfoPath is refocusing on developers by improving integration with Visual Studio, making it possible for users to fill out forms with a Web browser, and allowing developers to use InfoPath to build forms-processing applications based on SharePoint products. Visual Studio Support InfoPath 2003 SP1 added support for the .NET Framework, allowing developers to use programming languages like VB.NET and C# to write the code behind an electronic form rather than relying on JScript (which continues to be supported). But the process was cumbersome because developers had to create the visual layout of the form using InfoPath and the code using Visual Studio. With the 2007 release of Visual Studio Tools for Office, however, developers will be able to edit both the visual design and custom code of InfoPath forms within Visual Studio. In addition, debugging is integrated, so developers can step through custom code using familiar Visual Studio tools. Thin-Client Forms InfoPath 2007 introduces a new thin-client option for filling out forms. Developers using this option design a form with InfoPath (either directly or through Visual Studio) and then deploy the form to a server running the planned Forms Services server component. Users can then access and fill out the form using recent versions of several Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Safari. (See the illustration "InfoPath 2007 Thin-Client Architecture".) Thin-client InfoPath forms support most of the features of the full InfoPath client, including the ability to save a copy of a partially completed form locally (to support offline data entry) and conditional formatting (which adds or removes sections of the form based on user input). However, not all InfoPath features will be supported in browser forms. To help developers identify features that aren't available via thin client, the InfoPath form designer includes a Design Checker that identifies incompatibilities before the form is deployed. (For an illustration, see "InfoPath 2007 Design Checker".) Hosting Forms in SharePoint and Office InfoPath 2007 also gains a new role in customizing SharePoint. InfoPath can now be used to create Document Information Panels, small forms that prompt a user to enter required information about a document before the document is saved in SharePoint. For example, an employee-review document could have a property identifying the period of time the review covers. A document information panel would prompt the author to enter the appropriate information before the document is placed in the SharePoint library. Previously, Document Information Panels could be created only using ASP.NET, but developers can now use InfoPath to create a panel that appears in a Web browser or directly within Word and Excel if the user is accessing SharePoint directly from those applications. In addition to SharePoint Document Libraries, fields in InfoPath forms can be connected to other data sources, including enterprise resource planning and other back-end systems that expose Web services and workflow products such as BizTalk and Windows Workflow Services. Forms Services enables data from completed forms to be synchronized with these and other data sources. Overlap and Licensing May Slow Adoption Despite improvements that make the product more attractive to developers, two factors may hinder its adoption. First, InfoPath is not the only solution for building electronic forms. Microsoft offers a number of alternatives, including Windows Forms, Office applications such as Access, ASP.NET, and the upcoming Windows Presentation Foundation. In addition, Adobe has a competing solution built around its Portable Document Format (PDF), which offers the added advantage of being to replicate the appearance of an existing paper form precisely—a capability that is important to government and other highly regulated organizations. Second, although InfoPath's browser-based forms do not require each end user to have licensed and installed the complete InfoPath client, InfoPath licensing costs may be higher than those of its competitors. An organization must license Forms Services by purchasing either the planned Forms Server 2007 product or SharePoint Server 2007 (which includes the Forms Services functionality). In addition, users must have a Forms Server Client Access License (CAL) or a SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL to access the feature. An External Connector will be available for organizations looking to provide InfoPath forms to users on the public Internet—in that case, no CALs are required. However, External Connectors are often expensive, costing anywhere from 100 to 400 times the price of a single CAL. Pricing for SharePoint Server and Forms Server has not yet been announced. Resources The new features of SharePoint are summarized in "Office Server Line Taking Shape" on page 5 of the Mar. 2006 Update. Office 2007 pricing is available at www.microsoft.com/office/preview/info/pricing.mspx. A preview version of Visual Studio Tools for Office with InfoPath support can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/future/ctp_downloads/default.aspx. SharePoint 2007 licensing is described in "Client Access Licenses Split Server Features" on page 3 of the Mar. 2006 Update.
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