InfoPath Dev

I am needing to develop and implement an ‘Issue management & Enhancement application#%92 to be used initially by 10+ people who have Office Professional 2003 Licenses
My plan is to have a SQL 2000 backend and expose web services for a front end.
I am considering InfoPath as the front end for this – and am a newbie in this product. I feel that it might be a good tool to use to capture progress of issues from issue registration and subsequent(multiple) updates and re-assignments – using repeating tables.

I plan to have four infopath forms:
The first will be to register a new issue. The form will pre-populate with dropdown boxes (Priority, Status, Category etc).

The second form will differ slightly in that the initial details entered will be read only. Users can enter text providing progress information and also select ‘status#%92 and ‘re-assignment#%92 changes in drop-down lists; adding attachements; initiating emailing the issue etc. This data can be entered into a repeating table section.

The third form will provide search functionality - with a variety of filers (Status, Priority) etc. I plan to return and display list all issues meeting the search criteria entered. Each issue will be displayed as a hyperlink . In effect, this will the ‘Console#%92 as it will have a link to the form for a new issue entry in addition to the lists of previously entered issues found in the search; and also the reporting form described below.

The fourth form will be for reporting purposes displaying data to output to Excel etc. Such as average time for issue resolution ….

Other front end options would be MS Access, Winforms or ASP.Net.

I am looking for comment about me considering using Infopath as a tool of choice in this scenario. In particular, I am confused about the dual functions of users submitting data to a database and also saving completed infopath forms which could be saved to any location (even if we specify a particular location for the purpose) . This would result in documents not being being found when a link to them is selected.

There are a lot of good out of the box in Infopath to align with the user entry requirements but the choice of platform might be inappropriate. I would appreciate any opinions.

Cheers

Grant

If you have Windows Server 2003, install Windows Sharepoint Services and use the default out of the box Issues lists. No coding required.

Hi Grant and welcome to our forum!
This is easy (and inexpensive) to do with InfoPath and SharePoint. You can use our Database Accelerator product (see downloads section) to easily hook up your forms with SQL without writing code. You can even integrate with SharePoint for simple view and reporting functionality.

Hi Patrick,

 

I am working on a Form with the same functionality has above. I would like to be able to update the status of an Action Item submitted to a list in SharePoint (Assigned, Active, Closed) from either SharePoint or InfoPath. Can you tell me how or point in the right direction to how to be able to update the (status) in SharePoint from within my InfoPath Form?

 

I used CAML to submit my AIs from the Form to SharePoint and concatenated the unique ID with a count function to give each AI its own unique number. Now I want to some how be able to change the status of the Action Item from the Form based on the AI's unique number.

 

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!