J
JR
Hi all;
I would really like some input as to possible methods of how I can achieve my goal for a project we are working on.
Some time ago, we developed a Project Management type system where each project had it's own WSS site. Each project site had a project status report form, based on Infopath, that stored the report data (eg. financials, activities, timelines, etc.) as an XML document in a form library. Then, we built rollups that would "read" the XML data from each project site display financials totals, etc. at a higher level.
While the solution still works, it has some practicial limitations:
1) As more projects are added, the speed of the rollups becomes exponentially slower because they are have to traverse each project site and have to load and aggregate XML data.
2) Anytime a change is required to the form; it needs to be re-published to each site (currently about 100).
So, we've decided to rebuild a new (and improved??) system that uses a database on the backend instead of XML files. While this should alleviate some of the performance issues; we still have some other hurdles that need to be overcome.
1) Having an Infopath submitting to the database would still require it to exist on each site; therefore not reducing any of the maintenance issues.
2) We've thought of trying to have a single form library somewhere put that would require:
2a) somehow passing a parameter to Infopath to know which project the report is for
2b) relying on the user to select the correct project somehow, which is not realistically feasible
I guess we could always just use a web form instead of Infopath... but I'd really appreciate any ideas that anyone would like to offer.
Thanks.
-JR
I would really like some input as to possible methods of how I can achieve my goal for a project we are working on.
Some time ago, we developed a Project Management type system where each project had it's own WSS site. Each project site had a project status report form, based on Infopath, that stored the report data (eg. financials, activities, timelines, etc.) as an XML document in a form library. Then, we built rollups that would "read" the XML data from each project site display financials totals, etc. at a higher level.
While the solution still works, it has some practicial limitations:
1) As more projects are added, the speed of the rollups becomes exponentially slower because they are have to traverse each project site and have to load and aggregate XML data.
2) Anytime a change is required to the form; it needs to be re-published to each site (currently about 100).
So, we've decided to rebuild a new (and improved??) system that uses a database on the backend instead of XML files. While this should alleviate some of the performance issues; we still have some other hurdles that need to be overcome.
1) Having an Infopath submitting to the database would still require it to exist on each site; therefore not reducing any of the maintenance issues.
2) We've thought of trying to have a single form library somewhere put that would require:
2a) somehow passing a parameter to Infopath to know which project the report is for
2b) relying on the user to select the correct project somehow, which is not realistically feasible
I guess we could always just use a web form instead of Infopath... but I'd really appreciate any ideas that anyone would like to offer.
Thanks.
-JR