InfoPath 12 Headed for the Web

InfoPath’s capabilities will expand from designing desktop forms and entering data to creation of Web forms that end users fill out in a browser. The InfoPath design tools will also be available from within the Visual Studio development environment. The planned improvements will expand the reach of InfoPath, increase its ability to compete with Adobe’s PDF format, and make InfoPath more attractive for professional developers. However, licensing details, yet to be released, could affect costs and adoption rates. Moreover, InfoPath still faces internal competition from many existing and planned forms technologies from Microsoft.

Smart Forms for Office Users

Introduced with Office 2003, InfoPath is an application for forms design and XML data entry that uses a familiar Office-like interface and allows offline data entry, which is not possible with Web-based forms. InfoPath forms can contain custom code to validate data and submit completed forms to back-end applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, InfoPath forms designers do not have to write code for many tasks, including validating data formats, automatically expanding forms to include new line items, and submitting completed forms to Web services.