InfoPath Dev

Hi,

 I work at a Hospital for the NHS and I am setting up an InfoPath form to be used to input and query patient details from my area.

I am going to publish this form onto one of our shared drives for other users from other computers to access it.

Due to the confidential nature of the data I am obligated to keep this information secure from everyone who doesnt need to access it so I need to create a solution to this, I can't password protect the template as I would other Office programs such as Word or Excel nor can I find a way to do so in the help so I am assuming it isnt a built in feature, also the permissions settings on InfoPath won't work either as the computers are shared over lots of staff and as far as InfoPath is concerned they will all be the same user even when they aren't (its just the stupid way the IT dept has it set up).

 So, what I have thought of doing is writing a Script to help, now I am halfway there because I can easily add a default view with a button that changes to the desired view on clicking it and apply conditional formatting to that button so that it will only appear if a certain condition is met (i.e. a password is entered), but this all seems a bit sloppy.

I frequently use Userforms from Microsoft visual basic in Excel and a userform would be an ideal solution especially since you can protect the password by having each character appear as an asterisk but I have been unable to work out if it is possible to do something similar in Microsoft Script editor and InfoPath as I feel a popup box where the user inputs the password and then clicks a button to change the view seems much more polished to me.

 Hope that all makes sense, I know I can waffle on sometimes

Jon Smith

Hi Jon.

I have done several healthcare InfoPath solutions.

You can identify the user and secure these forms.  I can show you how to make them completely HIPAA compliant.

There are also some other design considerations you will want to look at such as form volumes and search and lookup.

Send me an email and I can show you what I know.

Hi Clay,

 I have a similar application that I want to password protect the form so no one else can view the content of the form......  The users need to publish their forms in share folder and the content is kind of confidential.....   Is there a way we can do that? (just like Word document)...

Thanks,

Vickie

Hi Vickie.

 Security is somewhat subjective so there are many ways to improve the security of your form.

InfoPath does not have the file password like Word or Excel does, ultimately because it is not a real effective form of security.  If you are using file shares then I would just set the permissions for all the files within the folder to only allow create, read, and update for the file creator and whomever else you want to have access but not allow most people to be able to view files they did not create.

Otherwise with web services that contact your security domain controllers and using SQL you can have the total granular security based on the user accessing the form no matter where the file is located. 

Thanks Clay for your prompt answer.

Thanks,

Vickie