InfoPath Dev

Sorry, in the "Preview" the formatting is all being stripped out. I hope it's not true in the actual post. I have a number of days Googling for info, watching YouTube SharePoint tutorials and searching amazon.com for reference manuals to purchase but I am not seeing a clear path at this point in my inquiry and I hope someone can assist me as I am out of my depth. I have been tasked with developing an intranet site that is basically a secure database that allows editing and reporting. (I will probably use MS SQLServer for the back-end but I am flexible on SQL solutions) Traditionally, I would use HTML, CSS and ASP to build the front-end but I have a limited amount of time to get this accomplished and so I am looking at alternatives. One thing I have been looking at is SharePoint and Infopath Dev, but I only have the "standard" version of SharePoint available to me. Can I accomplish the goal of developing a web-based database system using these tools, or should I develop the web forms as I have in the past? Can I use Infopath Dev without SharePoint for this project, writing directly to a database via ODBC/DSN connectors and "publish" the form pages? I would also welcome recommendations for any software packages that can make this process easier/faster. Any reference manuals that you can recommend? I appreciate any thoughts on this project.

Hi - I think what you would want would be InfoPath Forms Services, but I believe that is not included with SharePoint standard. IPFS is what allows InfoPath forms to run in the browser instead of the desktop filler application.

InfoPath Dev is just the name of this forum - the product itself is InfoPath (just so you know for future web searches).

Thanks for this information. Agreed on IPFS not being available in standard. Thanks for the correction on the name. I confused dev (developer) with des (designer). Looks like I will be finding an alternate solution to this project. I suspect I will just use Dreamweaver to create the forms with MS SQL Server as the back end and set up a secure intranet on one of my IIS servers. InfoPath looks like a nice solution but it requires quite an investment in hardware/software to use with SharePoint (another server with a quad core processor/Server 2008 R2/SharePoint Enterprise). Can you recommend any tools that work like InfoPath for form design but don't require SharePoint to develop an interactive web front end to a database? No idea why the formatting is not working, sorry.

Hopefully someone else will know of a good InfoPath replacement for web forms - I'm afraid I'm not terribly familiar with alternatives.