InfoPath Dev

I am doing some research for my company on capabilities of Moss 2007 and SharePoint for some tech demos we are building. I have some basic things working using the EMC starter kit and several other blogs as a resource.

Patrick, have you guys played much with WF, InfoPath 2007 and Moss?

I have a simple question in regards to task forms using InfoPath. If I have a group defined in my InfoPath datasource, it does not seem like I can access any values set through ExtendedProperties in my workflow. Is this possible? ExtendedProperties seems to be a hashtable. Do I not have the capability to work with collections of data in an InfoPath 2007 task form? Is my only solution to store the collection externally in a database rather than in the task item itself?

If no idea, just give me a heads up. I have come up with nothing on this...

Thanks!!!

Jason Apergis

Hi Jason,
Aside from some samples, we havn't done much with WF and MOSS. My general impression is that it will be good for simple workflow but there are many limitations and it is not a knowledge worker feature. In other words, you'll have to understand how to create a simple workflow. Not necessarily an IT Dev level task, but certainly more than a general knowledge worker. The good news is that it is built on WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation) which is a very promising platform.

No idea on the ExtendedProperties access for WF. Using our Web service (Qdabra Database Accelerator, aka DBXL) you can access Active Directory (AD) groups via the simple EmailFlow workflow formlet that we bundle with DBXL.

Sorry for the lack of detail here. I would like to understand this better. I will be meeting with Microsoft in the next week. I'll try to remember to ask them about this issue. Thanks for your patience!

FYI - I lost hours and hours trying to figure out how to properly deplpoy an InfoPath 2007 Sharepoint task as part of a worflow. I finally got it to work and yes - this is for developers only.

Some of the stuff you can do with SharePoint Designer 2007 is pretty good and actually powerful if you create custom activities and include them into the designer. But there is no way to integrate with InfoPath from there.

I was greatly disappointed that collections (groups of data) could not be utilized. But from experience with working both InfoPath and SharePoint that could be viewed as a good thing. If you are writing a custom business process store that business data in a nice normalized database. If that data is embedded down inside of a SharePoint task as part of a key/value pair collection you will not have any scalability to work with that data. I think I have a little design pattern that I may beef up.

Point is - yeah you can only do simple workflows and products like K2.net are better. But if you know the weak points, you can build some solid designs.

Hi Jason,
Great summary! We should talk. Drop me a line.