I have a fundamental workflow issue where by particular forms need to be generated and filled in by various users as part of a workflow.
I started off having the form as a task form in the workflow. The problem is that if this form is an important business document, you don't want it locked away in a field, in a list item, in the workflow task list. It might be an official document that another department needs to store with all the fancy information management policy's.
This evolved into the form being in a forms library, an instance gets programmatically created by the workflow and then a url is given to the user as part of a task form. The task says go to the url, complete the form and then return to this task and click complete. This is very messy from the users perspective. A separate window opens for filling in the form and then they have to remember to go back to the original form and complete the task. Often users forget to complete the task after submitting the main form which holds up the workflow.
So the next step that I'm contemplating is having the same form as part of both the workflow task and the forms library. So the form itself will be hosted as the task form. When completed in the task the workflow will take the completed xml and stuff it into a forms library.
The big problem here is, can you have a single administrator approved form template that is used both in a library and as part of a workflow? Furthermore these forms are likely change based on customers requirements. Forms naturally evolve over time with fields being added or branding changing. This single form will need to allow the customer to modify the template and then get their administrator to upgrade. The upgrade then needs to happen for both the library form and the task form.
Any suggestions or thoughts would be very much appreciated.