InfoPath is one of the lesser known applications in the Office System, but potentially one of the most powerful. InfoPath is Microsoft's solution for electronic forms and data input. Based entirely on XML, the data captured by an Infopath form can be re-used by SharePoint, SQL Server, web-services or any other application that understands XML.
Last year, I interviewed Gray Knowlton, Senior Product Manager for InfoPath 2003. Now that InfoPath 2007 is out, I thought it would be good to get an update on our electronic forms solution. Gray was kind enough to spend another hour with me on the phone, so here's the InfoPath 2007 prodcast!
Gray reviews the current release, talks about how customers are using Infopath 2003 today and then moves on to highlight the changes in Infopath 2007. One of the biggest changes he discusses is the ability to fill out an InfoPath form via a web browser. This is a huge advance and will enable customers to collect and validate data even if the Infopath client isn't installed on the user's local machine. Gray also discusses how InfoPath is natively hosted inside the other Office applications like Word and Excel, so meta data can now be caputured about the document and re-used by SharePoint.
Click to Play Audio (21:20)
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To learn more about Infopath 2007, please visit the Microsoft website.