InfoPath Dev

Hello all,

 I just found this great site and am looking forward to reading all the information here.

I am a total newbie to InfoPath, so please excuse me for asking "dumb questions".
In our company, we have several meeting rooms that our people can book. We also have a support staff that takes care of getting the rooms ready for the meetings - cleaning, setting up for coffee and tea, cookies etc. However, not all users are good at providing the needed information for the support staff and this creates some irritating issues for us.

I was thinking of a solution like this: When a user wants to book a meeting room, he has to fill out a special form. Only when that form is filled out, the meeting room will be booked and the needed information should be forwarded automagically to the support staff.

Now, I have two questions.
1) Can we do this with InfoPath (we use Office 2007, Exchange 2003)?
2) Any special good tips for getting started with this project?

Thank you in advance for any help at all.

Regards
Simon

Hi Simon.

You definitely can make a nice form in InfoPath for the requestor which will not submit unless they complete it properly.

What is the workflow you are anticipating?  If you hope to have it automatically book a resource in Exchange, etc then that would be much more difficult.  If you are going to keep an availability calendar somewhere else then that might be easier.  If you are going to submit to the staff and they will make the actual reservation then that is easy you just need the form.

Well, I was kind of hoping for a solution that could automatically book the resource in Exchange as well as sending the relevant information to the appropriate staff member.
The resources are all created as "resources" in Exchange - so when you make a booking, it will already automatically accept it (if it's available at the time).

I was thinking somewhere in the line of this workflow:
1) Someone wants to book a meeting - could possibly be from within their SharePoint site.
2) It should not be possible to press "submit" until all fields are correctly filled.
3) After submitting, an email should be sent to the appropriate supporting staff member(s).
4) An email (or whatever a booking is called) should be submitted to Exchange and the resource should be booked.
5) Support staff replies with a confirmation email to the original creator.

I don't know how to send a resource booking using a "manual" email - but I would guess it's possible. :-)

 Anyway, thank you for your help. Can you point me to a place where I could get information about getting started with this project? Im seriously missing a "totorial" on how to use InfoPath. For what I have read about it, InfoPath could solve a lot of our issues, but it seems it is a bit dificult to get started with.

 Thanks

Simon