Experiences developing offline solutions for SharePoint with InfoPath?

Question

With the widespread acceptance of SharePoint 2007 at my current client, more and more, there are questions about filling out forms offline that then get synchronized when they are connected back to the network.

This seems like exactly what Microsoft built InfoPath for, so here's my (totally untested) thought: We have a library of InfoPath forms which users connect to their Outlook client, so they have the forms locally when they go offline. They can then open them at their leisure, fill them out, and save the result. Then, they get back online...

... and then some magic happens ...

... and the form data is saved to a SharePoint list.

So naturally, I need to find out what that magic is, but do any of you have any tips, pointers, or war stories about InfoPath/SharePoint integration you can share?

Answer 1

I have some war stories around using InfoPath Forms Services for internal users that have access to SharePoint along with the InfoPath fat client for external users that do not have access to SharePoint. A slick solution that involved emailing the form to the external users and back to the SharePoint library, but there were gotchas that required code to workaround issues.

This probably doesn't apply to your solution, but one issue that comes to mind immediately is that InfoPath Forms Services requires the XML to have a HREF attribute pointing to the template, but this is not used on the client - in fact it is discarded by the client which causes Forms Services to blow up. An event handler on the form library had to be written to put the HREF back in place.

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Update - I forgot to mention that some of my notes on InfoPath (many related to offline usage) can be found on our SharePoint Depth Wiki here: http://wiki.threewill.com/display/enterprise/InfoPath+Notes

For what it's worth, we have used Groove with this solution as well (Groove along with InfoPath Forms Services and InfoPath client).

Answer 2

You could utilize MS Groove for offline collaboration that will sync with SharePoint:

Microsoft Office 2007 Document: Groove and SharePoint Integration