Publishing an InfoPath form as a content type vs. not

Doreen — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:53:29 GMT

I have created a new IP 2007 form for SharePoint 2007 to replace an old form and I am ready to plan it's migration to production environment.

The old form is currently the only form published to the old library and is attached to a Windows Workflow (WWF) installed as a solution.

The new form is re-written from scratch, published to new library (currently in dev environment) and is attached to a SharePoint Designer workflow. It works great thanks to all the guidance I have found here! :)

The user would like to keep the old forms and new forms in the same (old) library. I believe this is possible by creating the new form as a content type? Of course it would be cleaner if I could keep the new form in its separate new library.

My question is what is best practice? Is this a big deal to combine them? Is there a good reason to NOT combine them?

My goal would be to stop using the old form when the new form is published so I would need to hide the old template (so a user won't mistakenly use it in the future). The other problem I see is numbering of the form. Each form (old and new) adopts a different unique numbering strategy where the old form is numbered by WWF and is completely autonomous of the SharePoint library ID #. The new form adopts the SharePoint library ID as part of the unique ID, the first part being the two digit year like this 12-078, where "078" is the library ID #. So the new form numbering technique will be a continuous number with only the first two digit changing each year as opposed to old numbering system where it starts over each year.

The old form actually starts over each year like this in year 2011 first form # is 11-001, then 11-002, 11-003. In year 2012 first form is 12-001....etc

SharePoint Integration

Publishing an InfoPath form as a content type vs. not