InfoPath Dev

hi,

I need some advice about how to approach automating a business process. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I have been asked to use Infopath 2007 forms and the 'canned' Approval workflow in Sharepoint.

Briefly, I need to automate a process that begins with a form being submitted that will have a submit button.

Step 2 is where the form will be sent to a manger for approval. Upon his/her approval,an email will be sent to my department and a process on our mainframe will be kicked off if it is accepted.  I think I can take a column from a report or list and then store it in a data connection, like sql server for example.  The mainframe process will need to access this data connection to check whether or not to start the process.

Step 3   When the mainframe job/process ends, it should update the data connection with some other variables gathered at run-time, which will then be read into the Sharepoint Server library or list.

Step 4  Another Infopath form is sent to the manager with information gathered in step 3 . The manager accepts or rejects. If he accepts then

another process on the mainframe begins.  I need to update the data connection with data from the mainframe as well as information from Infopath

Step 5  Once the process ends another email is sent to the manager telling him that it is completed.

So far, I have created some different forms and have created a data connection, but I'm not sure about how it will work together, especially with the workflow. It seems that I might need to create a customer workflow rather than use the approval workflow.  Also, maybe this requires more than one workflow. I hope I given enough information that you can tell me what you think. Has someone done something similar?   I'm eager to hear what you think about this.

Thanks very much

Hi.

We have done something similar to this.

We have a Infopath form with a whole lot of textboxes, we submit this form to a sharepoint library. In this library, we have made a custom workflow with Sharepoint Designer, that checks the library for new or changed forms. When it find one, a step in the workflow sends a e-mail to a user specified by a hiden textbox in the infopath form. The user recieved the e-mail with a link to the infopath form.

When he opens this form, he review it and the click on a accept or reject button and then the form submits again and closes the form. The workflow starts up again and proceed to the next step in the workflow.

Try using Sharepoint Designer to make your workflow.

Thanks for your response.  I'll look into doing the workflow with Sharepoint.