InfoPath Dev

My first question was answered so promptly and helpfully, I thought I would throw my only other quandry out.. 

Does anyone have any experience with using InfoPath in environments requiring strict change control?

We have a development environment (usually VMWare Workstation), where most of the work on these forms is performed. When developer testing is complete, the form has to be migrated from development SharePoint to staging. Since the forms we are using have a handful of secondary data connections, and since the dev environment can't see staging or production, there are a handful of form settings that have to change during this process.

Then QA gets a crack at it, signs off, and the form must be republished to production. During this publication, the same form settings have to change to move the data sources, etc from staging to production.

And this is the rub. QA needs to sign off on these changes before they go into production, but going into production requires changes. It's a true catch-22, chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter situation. Just wondering if anyone has dealt with such issues, and if there is a guideline or best practice for it.

I think if we could build a deployment utility which could be tested by QA, they would be satisfied (provided it offered little opportunity for user error). But I can only imagine that you can change these settings in the template xml (seems sketchy) or via some sort of Office Automation (seems painful).

Or am I missing the point altogether?

You can automate some of the deployment and update of the data sources but either way you slice it is a modification.

You could create a tool to probably make these bulk type changes.

We use a tool which updates the URL's for our webservices dynamically.

Publish to server A and the webservices are updated to point at server A

Typically we do not have stringent requirments it is just a time and error saver (convenience)

There is no way around not having to change the environmental variables.

Another solution would be using UDC's with MOSS 2007, which is nice since you can abstract that layer. Not sure if that might be an option for you. Email me if you would like to discuss.