Pie in the Sky?

InfoPath is the best forms editor on the market today because it lets you create rich forms with structured data without having to rely on a developer to code features. Business process owners can quickly prototype and publish forms with no dependency on developers or IT staff to deploy the forms. Less code means less cost to you both in up front development work and long-term maintenance work. You quickly create a form and when changes are needed, you can do them yourself. Well, that was InfoPath's promise at least...

Profitability Trumps the Best of Intentions

When I led a team of developers on the InfoPath 2003 team, we used to go around saying that 75% of all forms would not require code. We had the best intentions and truly wanted to believe in that ideal, but the reality was that version 1.0 of InfoPath (2003 SP1) got it backwards – 75% of all forms needed code for simple things like sorting tables, getting user name or checking to see if the form was new, etc. InfoPath 2007 (version 2) wasn’t much better. Sure, a few of these gaps were filled – a UserName function was made available – but the focus was on browser-based forms. InfoPath 2010 invested further in SharePoint (Microsoft has to make money selling SharePoint these days now that Office sales are saturated) and the changes to the rich client were mostly to implement the Office ribbon. Still, today, most forms need a small amount of code to do a few simple things. That’s really too bad because it creates a barrier to most people using InfoPath.

Finally, the Promised Land!

After leaving Microsoft we became InfoPath consultants (Qdabra has the most InfoPath MVPs in the World - WooHoo!) and the first thing we did was to create a common library of code snippets to cover these "codeless" gaps. We called this library qRules. qRules lets you use rules in place of code. You know you love creating rules, and so do we - no code required. It’s been nearly two years since we released the first version of qRules. Today, qRules contains ~25 of the most commonly requested functions accessible via rules. We’ve even extended qRules to do things that aren’t available in InfoPath today – like encrypting fields. Finally, with qRules, we can make good on the promise that 75% of all InfoPath forms don’t need code. That’s good for you because you can do more with less and you don't need a developer to do it.  

Give qRules a try for free today. Here’s a link: http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/qRules.aspx.