Publish form to Public Folder

[clpow]

Call me dumb but for the life of me I cannot figure this out. Hopefully
someone can point me in the right direction. HEre is the scenario;

Designing form using infopath 2007 on Windows Vista OS.
Outlook 2007 with Exchange Server 2003
Other users using Infopath 2003 and Outlook 2003 on Windows XP.

We need the following functionality.

User should be able to navigate to Outlook Public folder, go directly to the
form and enter their data. Meaning we do not want the user to have the form
as an email attachment it should be just as if opening a document entering
the data and then closing the document.

Question: (1) How can we accomplish this?
(2) How do we publish the form to a public folder?

Thanks to anyone for any help.

 

[Clay Fox]

Is this one form that everyone updates or each person updates a version of
the form?

InfoPath must have a central template that governs each form that is
created. I do not believe you can publish this to a public folder, it would
need to be on a file share somewhere. The individual forms could then be
saved in the public folder but everyone would need access to the template.

You could use SharePoint to provide central handling of the Forms or you
could look at the Database Accelerator which allows you to have a central
database of all of your forms. http://www.qdabra.com

The way InfoPath forms are architected, I believe prevents you from using a
public folder solely. You at least need to use a fileshare in conjunction
with them. Best practice would be to use a centralized repository.
--
Thanks

Clay Fox

Qdabra Software
http://www.qdabra.com

InfoPathDev.Com
The Largest InfoPath Forum in the World
http://www.infopathdev.com

 

[K.Ramana Reddy(GGK Tech)]

Hi,

Create folder as type "Infopath Form Items" in the Outlook and publish the
form to that folder.
You can Open the form from that folder.

I hope this will help for you.

 

[clpow]

This is a single form that everyone updates. It is essentially a data sheet
designed to resemble an Excel spreadsheet, each user will be adding or
updating a row.

 

[clpow]

Thank you for your response. I created a new folder called 'test' in public
folders, however I do not see how to publish the form to that folder. From
outlook the only option is 'New infopath form' choosing this option opens
infopath for the user to choose a form, enter the data, and having to click
submit to update the form. This we do not want. We only want the enduser to
update the form and close it.

Bare with me if some of this seems elementary I am new to infopath and
having to learn on my own.

 

[David Dean]

You can only do what you're attempting if all users have Outlook 2007 and
InfoPath 2007 installed on their workstations. In that case, you can create
an Outlook folder that contains InfoPath Form Items and associate it with
your form template. This capability is not available with the 2003 versions
of Outlook and InfoPath.

You can get close to what you want by using the following steps:
- Publish the form template (.XSN file) to a folder on a public web server
or file share. All users must be granted Read access to this location.
- Type in the URL of the form template in your browser address bar. This
will launch InfoPath with a blank version of the form.
- Fill out the form for the initial version and save the resulting XML
document to a public web server or file share folder. This should be stored
in a different folder from the form template, as all users must have
Read/Write access to the folder.
- Create a shortcut to the XML document using a UNC path or a URL, depending
on the location of the file. Double-clicking the shortcut should now open the
saved form in InfoPath.
- If you want users to launch the form within Outlook, create a new message
and add a hyperlink to the URL or UNC path of your form to the body of the
message, then save the message to the public folder.

Remember, just like using a shared Excel spreadsheet, only one user at a
time will be able to open and edit the form.

 

[clpow]

Thank you, this gets me close to what I need to accomplish. This will work
until our remaining workstations are upgraded to office 2007.