Wednesday, August 23, 2006

InfoPath example

OK I promised some InfoPath info. It was a lot more difficult than I thought. I did some searching and came up with a bunch of fairly useful resources
The following is very much in a note form as I played with these resources

I would recommend downloading the documents suggested if you are remotely interested in this.

Egghead Folder listing

Only for gurus

Here is an example of tech geek speak that doesn’t even make sense to a newbie.
Does this mean you have to be an oracle expert first? Sure hope not. I don’t even know what a BPEL is!

Download this document!
Lab 1 is just for gurus also
I think I need to find something more basic!

Aha - Lab 2 in this document - step by step - good stuff - and no weird server geek speak.

This is good. (Note: Office 2003 and Info Path 2003 used for this lab)
I learnt how to create a basic form and it worked.
Note: I had to skip the bit about connecting to the Contosa database as it didn’t exist on my install.
I saved the form and emailed it to myself.
Then I completed the form and saved it.
I did a second one also.

Here is a simple top 10 FAQ type web page for InfoPath

That’s some basic InfoPath stuff.

I can really see how useful this would be for accountants. Especially if you have recalcitrant employees that getting expense claim reports from is next to impossible, or maybe for completing leave requests or some other basic form: petty cash for example.
However you need an IT degree (almost) to install and setup the Info Path servers. I can't wait to try the new versions (office 2007 and the 2007 servers)