Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Chapter 14. Electronic Forms in MOSS 2007

By John Holliday

The subject of electronic forms is much broader than SharePoint, but in many ways, getting electronic forms to work in a SharePoint environment brings out many of the core issues involved in realizing their value. In other words, the core value proposition for using electronic forms in the first place is to reduce the effort involved in collecting and manipulating data by capturing and presenting the data in a consistent manner, storing the data in a central location so that it can drive common business processes, and manipulating the data with a common set of business rules. When you think about it, this is why SharePoint and electronic forms fit together so well. It is also why developing an effective electronic forms solution has been so challenging.

InfoPath 2003 was Microsoft's first attempt to capture the essential features required for an effective electronic forms solution. It turned out to be a very difficult problem to solve because data gathering and presentation is such a common requirement that it affects just about every layer of the platform. On the one hand, you want to make it easy for end users to work with the data, so you need a rich user experience whether they are working independently or in a collaborative environment. At the same time, you want to empower developers to build solutions that consume the data efficiently without concern for its origin or final destination. Finally, you want to enable ...