Best practice methodolgy for Forms implementation and deployment

[John]

Hi all,

While I'm not new to programming on the MOSS 2007 platform, I am regarding
Forms server.

My company is about to embark on the use of Forms and Forms server and I'm
busy getting my head around this technology. I notice there are a lot of
different methods regarding connections and am wondering what the best
practice is regarding the use of connections as well as the deployment of
the Forms themselves?

I do foresee a multitude of Forms to be created/used over the forecoming
year as well as some of these Forms needing to be available to our partners
externally (i.e. intenet) as well as internally (intranet). Is there a
one-solution fits all? Would web services be the way regarding
fetching/updating data for both scenarios?

Also, could the deployment of the Forms (via Central Admin) be
progammatically automated for simplicty's sake?

Any help forthcoming would be greatly apperciated.

Regards
John.

 

[Michael]

Hi John,

You are correct that there is several different ways of using InfoPath forms
and InfoPath Forms Services. With my past projects I have discovered using
InfoPath Forms Services from Central Admin has been the easiest way to keep
all the forms organized. On most of the projects we end up using the
Category and Description properties from InfoPath 2007 form designer (File,
Properties). Another big thing is using the forms Content Type object in
Form Library and Site Columns. You can reuse a Site Column per site
collection from the Property Promotion screen from the publishing wizard. We
have also used Web Services/WCF for a lot of things. We use it for getting
AD information by LDAP, Oracle data, SQL data and other misc things.

Also, I'm pretty sure that you can automate the automation of publishing
forms with using the infopath forms services sdk.

Good luck.

Cheers,
Michael
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mdlotter