business process management

[brendan]

Hello.

I am a newbie to the infopath world, just heard of it last week. However,
this is my problem, please let me know if infopath is the correct solution,
or please give me advice on where to look for the correct solution.

I have about 12 people reporting on several projects I manage. Each person
reporting on different subjects (quality, sales, marketing, etc.) Here are
the issues:
1) I need one local place for all parties involved to report to, that I can
manage and access easily.
2) The overall process, new product development, is about 40 steps in the in
all. Some of the steps are in parallel and some in series. Can infopath
handle such processes?
3) Most of the people have action items once a specific step in the process
is completed, is this an efficient way to notify them?

You advice and guidance is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Brendan

 

[Patrick Halstead [InfoPath MVP]]

Hi Brendan,

Welcome to InfoPath! Yes, you can do workflow with InfoPath. There are two
general patterns - forms-based or server-based. Both are descibed in my book
by MS Press titled "Developing Solutions with InfoPath 2003". Chapter 10
covers forms-based workflow. Chapter 11 covers server-based workflow with
BizTalk. In addition, there is a great lab on MSDN that will help you
explore BizTalk (I think it's Lab 12).

My advice would be to install SharePoint and set up a Form Library for the
document collaboration and use Forms-based workflow since it is simpler to
set-up but will require managing status in the form. If you have strict
access control requirements (for example: you want to prevent users from
seeing forms assigned to others, etc.) then you will want to look at
Server-based workflow. Lots of options here and really depends on whether
you already have a workflow engine or not. BizTalk will require an IT
Developer to configure and manage. Lab 12 took me a couple days to figure
out!

For multiple forms, you can use the Import and Merge Forms feature in
InfoPath to do A->B workflow between multiple form libraries.

Hope this helps,
Patrick
http://www.infopathdev.com/forums