Microsoft InfoPath for Not Yet Techies

Microsoft InfoPath 2003 is a new addition to the famous Office suite of software program applications, and what it's good for will not be immediately obvious to many people unlike, say, Word or FrontPage.

The latest version of MS InfoPath is 2003 but Microsoft is getting the 2007 version ready. You can expand InfoPath 2003 with the Office 2003 Service Pack (SP-1).

Info Path is for creating forms that use XML to capture and validate user input. It is the first software application tool to get information online using XML and send it to a back end Web Services without needing translation.

You can use Microsoft Info Path to create forms that do many different things that a business needs, such as allow customers to request more information. That's a lead for the business, and that business needs to capture as much information about the prospect as possible -- not only name, rank and contact information, but answers to questions about their needs and priorities.

By using a form created with MS InfoPath, all that information is captured and send to a back end database such as Microsoft SQL Server. It can integrate with only Web Services. It can also be re-arranged and customized for the sales person who will call on the customer. Data is separate from the formatting -- unlike, say, this web page, where these words are marked up with XHTML to be shown on your browser a certain way.

XML is an important technology that allows us to capture information about data. For instance, if you have a document with the word "Access" in it you can specify whether it refers to the Microsoft database program or to the generic word "access" meaning able to get into.

InfoPath 2003 is flexible it allows XML editing to create semi-structured documents. That is, you can control the data model, for the information that's important to you and your business. You control what's called the scheme -- the underlying structure of information in the InfoPath template.

Each MS InfoPath 2003 document is HTML based, but contains an XML data document and a template for the presentation of the data.

InfoPath conforms to XML Scheme, XPath and XSLT standards.

As part of Microsoft Office, InfoPath has the same familiar WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface environment, and it combines with other applications such as Word, Access, Excel and so on.

You design a wide variety of forms for many uses for prospects, customers, clients, suppliers, other people within your company, team members and so on. You can use digital signing. A developer can use Visual Studio .NET to customize forms.

You can also use Microsoft InfoPath 2003 create RSS 2.0 files (RSS is very popular on the web right now).

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