Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

560 18.2 Configuring InfoPath Forms Services

18.2 Configuring InfoPath Forms Services

InfoPath Forms Services is a shared service that is enabled upon activation of

the Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Feature. The Enterprise Feature is

scoped at the Web application level and, as such, appears on the Manage

Web Application Features page within the SharePoint central administration

(Figure 18.2). If the Feature is inactive, then InfoPath Forms Services is not

available to the site collection associated with the Web application. Addition-

ally, if you have not yet configured SharePoint Shared Services within your

server farm, Form Services is not available. Therefore, from a Forms Services

configuration standpoint, the first tasks to perform involve configuring

Shared Services and ensuring that the Enterprise Feature is activated. Once

these tasks have been accomplished successfully, you can start publishing

forms and form templates to Forms Services.

Is that really all there is to configuring Forms Services? Although you

can start leveraging Forms Services right away, there are numerous configura-

tion settings that allow you to fine-tune your implementation. For example,

Forms Services has the concept of user-deployed form templates and admin-

istrator-deployed form templates. Developers, in this instance, fall into the

“user” category. By default, users are allowed to deploy relatively simple form

templates to Forms Services. What do we mean by relatively simple? A form

template must have a specific set of characteristics to require it to be deployed

by an administrator, such as a form template that contains managed code.

Let’s consider an organization that wants to control the form templates pub-

lished to InfoPath Forms Services by requiring all form templates to be

deployed to a central location by an administrator. To accomplish this, the

administrator configures Forms Services to disallow users from publishing

browser-enabled form templates by simply unchecking the Allow users to

browser-enable form templates checkbox from the Configure InfoPath

Forms Services page (Figure 18.3). With this setting unchecked, users can no

longer deploy form templates to Forms Services. However, they can still

deploy form templates that are not browser-enabled to SharePoint. Forms

instantiated from these templates are only viewable and editable using the

InfoPath client. We will revisit the deployment process for form templates

later in this chapter.

Table 18.1 lists the configuration options available from the InfoPath

Forms Services configuration page. The sister setting that works in con-

junction with the Allow users to browser-enable form templates setting is

the Render form templates that are browser-enabled by users setting. If you

have had your SharePoint Server 2007 implementation running for quite

some time and decide to take control over the browser-enabled form tem-

plate deployment process to prevent users from being able to publish forms

without administrator approval, you may still want to provide users with

18.2 Configuring InfoPath Forms Services 561

Chapter 18

the ability to render forms that have been instantiated from pre-existing

user-deployed form templates. Checking the Render form templates that

are browser-enabled by users setting makes this possible. If you were to

uncheck both settings, users would not be able to deploy browser-enabled

form templates, nor would they be able to view or edit existing forms that

were generated from the previously deployed template. It is unlikely that

you will configure Forms Services so that the Allow users to browser-enable

form templates setting is checked, and the Render form templates that are

browser-enabled by users setting is unchecked. Doing so would mean that

users are able to deploy browser-enabled form templates to Forms Services,

but nobody would be able to view or edit those forms in a browser, which

really defeats the purpose of deploying the template to Forms Services in

the first place.

Figure 18.2

InfoPath Forms

Services enabled.

Figure 18.3

Preventing user

deployment of form

templates.