InfoPath 2007 Focuses on Developers

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

InfoPath 2007’s improved ties to Visual Studio and SharePoint and its 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 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:

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