Quick questions re moving to InfoPath forms

Question

Hi there:

I’ve been asked to look into how best to move forms into InfoPath and have a couple of basic questions about your experiences so I can get an insider’s lay of the land. Even some short, quick bullets would be really helpful -- thank you!

• Are you starting from scratch in InfoPath, or are you converting from paper or a different e-format? (Jetform, PDF, etc.)

• Are you trying to re-create the layout of a specific paper form, or is a regular online form OK? (trying to learn what the latest thinking is about this)

• Do you need only simple fill and submit capabilities, or do you need programming for calculations, validation, database lookup/entry/reporting, etc. as well? (don’t know how much harder it is to do all this vs. not)

• How long does each form take to finish? (I know it depends, but is there a rough guideline for planning purposes?)

• Who’s doing the actual work? (by title or function)

• What is especially straightforward or challenging about moving to InfoPath forms? (forewarned is forearmed!)

Answer 1

We are in the process of moving all our company forms to InfoPath. This is approximately 70 total encompassing things such as Vacation Requests, Time Card Adjustments, etc. I will answer your questions based on that.

The current forms are in Word format and people print them and fill them out. There is actually a function in InfoPath to import/convert Word documents so our "forms" department can create them fairly easily without developer support (and the forms have to identically match the Word versions - even if there are ways to improve, it is a political factor not a technical one). This process is very quick (the form can be created in an hour or so). At this time we are just using simple fill in and submit capabilities although we would like to add prepopulation of certain fields in the future.

The two most challenging aspects we faced (so far) are digital signatures and publishing the forms. The idea of digital signatures is great and we definitely wanted to use them but understanding how they work and making sure the form is designed correctly took a little training for the nontechnical people creating the forms. Publishing took a little explaining as well. Our users were creating a form locally and then just emailing it around or copying it to shares without ever publishing it - which just errors out for any user but the author. Teaching them the proper process (and explaining why it was setup that way) took a bit of time.