InfoPath Dev

After reading much of the newbie questions and answers that seemed to come close to what questions I had, I think I have an idea of what I need to do but I just need some confirmation that I'm headed in the right direction.

 I'm trying to create a form that people throughout my organization can use.  I had created one but not everyone could access it and I think it was because of where I created the form.  It was on a shared drive that not everyone had access to and I think that's what was causing the errors for others.  Since then, the drive was moved to another server and now I can't even get back into the "design mode" so I'm going to have to rebuild the form from scratch anyway.   What I'm thinking after reading all the info I could on this site and from a few books and the Microsoft web site and the fact I work in what Clay Fox had described as a "hostile" IT environment in one of his responses, I'm thinking I have to build the template for my form on a server or share drive that is accessible to everyone in the organization and let them fill it in from there and just attach it to an email to send me the completed form so I can do what I need to do with it.  That should keep the errors from popping up since the template will be in a place everyone can "touch" it and it will not make us have to download anything, including a trusted form which would probably offend our IT gods and make them throw their thunderbolts at me!

 I just need to know if that's the right way to go before I try to rebuild the template again and start getting angry phone calls from users.

 Just for more info, I don't need to export the form into anything or attach it to anything, I just need the form and the flexibility that I can only find in Infopath.  I have temporarily rebuilt the file in Adobe Acrobat but people are now complaining they can't save it and not everyone has Acrobat Pro but they do all have Infopath. (Even if they don't know it - our IT company downloaded it with Office 2003 but didn't mention it, nor do they have any support for it.)

 Thanks for any help you can provide!  Just reading through the newbie section was a great help for me.

Hi Rhiannon. Welcome to the wonderful world of InfoPath.

Sorry to hear you are another Knowledge worker/ Process owner under siege in a "hostile" place. InfoPath, since it is already installed, is a great tool for battling back without IT support.  I have successfully deployed large form solutions with IT actually fighting against it and am happy to say it was easy to support and everyone loved it and IT has given up trying to squash it. :) Do not lose hope!

InfoPath has to access the published template to create or view the XML documents so yes you need to have a share and give everyone at least read access to it.

If you can get everyone write access I would suggest you create a submit data connection and have them submit the files there once they are complete.  This is typically more consistent than email or maybe both if you want a notification.

What do you do with the data once you receive it?

No reporting or moving the information into some other system?

Hi Clay, thanks for the welcome.

It's a government thing, I think.  Always the last to embrace the new technologies. I didn't even know Infopath existed as an application since it didn't come with my Office Pro I got for my home computer (spend the day working in Excel you just can't go back to MS Works, lol) and just stumbled across it one day on my work computer after the upgrade to Office 2003, saw the words "create forms" and just jumped in and started playing around with it.

That's what I thought about the access but I'm not an IT type person (I'm a budget geek!) and I wasn't sure I had it right.  That said, you lost me on the "create a submit data connection" - can you put that in english?  Or at least give me the "For Dummies" version?  Funny cartoon is optional! :) 

As for what I do with the data, actually nothing really.  It's more a form to be filled out and then printed or emailed to other people for them to review and read and make decisions based on the answers to all the questions.  Like I said, I have created an Acrobat version of it which gives me a handy pdf but it's not user friendly and you can't stop in the middle of filling it out and go back like you can with Infopath forms - the basic reason I would like to go back to Infopath.  The other flexibility I need is to have it so someone can fill in part of the form, save it, email it to someone else to fill out some other stuff and when it's finally done send it to me so I can give it a unique number and send it to the folks who need to read it and make decisions.  And the people who want to fill it out also want to save "copies" on their drives for their future reference. (Like I said, it's a government thing!)

 Thanks for the help!

Yes most often it is a government thing.

I could tell you how to do it right, make it nice, buttoned down, and a fully functional architecture that could be leveraged for many forms. This would give the most potential functionality and allow you to make the forms rapidly and easily with the least amount of stress..  but that would require some IT components.

If you can sell a VP or director on it and make a case for IT to give you a few resources then that is the way to go.  It is not a cost issue but typically a political issue and who supports it etc.

If you want to struggle through "guerilla style" then you would take a different strategy.

Ideally the workflow and the data should be structured and secured at each point.  If you are just emailing individual forms around and users are saving their own copies and the data is locked up in the forms it has the potential to be messy, but still might be better than what you currently have. Unfortunately, you will be missing a lot of the elements that can really make elecronic process great.

Data Connections are how you move data in and out of your form.  So any secondary data, such as say Active Directory data which would identify each person who opens a form and provide their department, location, manager, etc, would be an example of a receive data connection.  Submit data connections would be to store the form or its data into a database, SharePoint, email attachment, or File Location.

Go to tools and data connections. other spot you will want to check out is tools - form options.

If you keep the data in a backend database then you can have automatic web reports and analysis via Excel, which I know is a sweet thing to any budget geek. That is where you get your ROI.

If you would like to see a web demo of such a system send me an email. 

Have fun and let me know how it goes.