Infopath forms in CMS

[Simon Lock]

Don’t know if you can help me but here goes.

We have built a generic web site using CMS that can be reused for event
registration purposes. A developer we hired has built the templates etc
within CMS and we are happy that my technicians can take a site and reproduce
it to generate a new registration site and then hand it over to the business
owners to do the normal channel manager ‘stuff’ within CMS.

What the business owners would also like to do is to produce a form that
they can add to the site so that registrants can complete and then it would
populate a back end database.

However, because the events could be wide and varied (from a technical
seminar to a customer golf day) the type and range of queries are massive.
Our developer is telling us that he would need to know all the possible
variations so he could write some code to allow the business owners to review
the list and turn on and off the requirement to complete the particular
fields…

Now I am not technical at all but I would have thought that surely something
like InfoPath could interact with CMS and provide that functionality that the
business owners could amend as required, rather than the developer?

Could anyone advise or point me in the direction of who could. We are a
Gold partner but our competency is not in this area and my internal guys
cannot assist.

 

[S.Y.M. Wong-A-Ton]

While InfoPath can be bound to a SQL Server database, the SQL Server database
used by MCMS has a proprietary format. So unless you wrote web services based
on the API of MCMS and used those to communicate between MCMS and InfoPath,
it would be difficult to have InfoPath smoothly interact with MCMS. Also, it
might be quite a challenge to use InfoPath forms within MCMS templates/pages.

It is best to repost your question in the MCMS newsgroup to get a take on
your scenario from the "other side" and perhaps get a more MCMS-centric
solution.