InfoPath Dev

Hello all!

 This is my first post I hope I don't end up just asking questions but also collaborating. Anyways, at work I started to use InfoPath and Sharepoint to manage sales information.

The problem is that when the sales guy goes to a client site he doesn't have access to the internet and ergo our Sharepoint Site...

 Is there a way to capture the information offline then merge the information with the online form, uploaded at a form library in sharepoint?

 The online form contains a repeating table. I want to use it as if it were an excel file but in info path... I don't know if I made it clear.

for example:

Then the sales rep1 append rows to the repeating table at a client site and also rep2 and when they get to the office they could synch the info.

 Any suggestions on how to tackle this??

 Thanks in advance and BTW awesome site!!

Cheers,

Jamir

Hi Jamir,

This is a very advanced questions for your first post! :)  Doing reconciliation of offline forms is tricky because you have to deal with scenarios where the form was changed from other people.

You can use File-Save and File-SaveAs to support offline saves. The forms should have a submit button and ideally some logic that detects online/offline.

Merging requires reconciliation which is very hard. I recommend giving the user a warning message saying the form is out-of-date and requesting that they manually merge. That'll be less work.

Microsoft has released Groove Workspaces as part of SharePoint 2010. Groove supports identifying merge scenarios but merge is manual.

Qdabra Software (provider of this free forum) also supports offline synch with Qdabra Web Services Suite v2.4 (DBXL). Merge is manual here too. This is a less expensive alternative to SharePoint and available for companies who have MOSS 2007 (i.e. won't be moving to SharePoint 2010 soon).

Hope this was a wee bit helpful. Sorry if not.

Yeah... I figured it was going to be something like that... the thing is we were trying to do less work because all that information will be uploaded to Microsoft Dynamics SL.. well... we'll stay with Excel for the time being.. and well it was fun to learn InfoPath :)

Cheers!