Screenshot of Microsoft InfoPath 2007. |
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
| Stable release | 2010 (14.0.4763.1000) / June 15, 2010 |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Collaborative software |
| License | Proprietary commercial software |
| Website | office.microsoft.com/infopath/ |
Microsoft Office InfoPath is a software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data. According to one of its inventors, a key architectural design decision was "to adhere to the XML paradigm of separating the data in a document from the formatting."[1] Thus the product features a WYSIWYG form design area in which the various controls (dropdowns, text boxes, etc.) are bound to data fields represented separately as a hierarchical tree view of folders and data fields. A patent filed in 2000 by Adriana Neagu, Jean Paoli and others describes the technology as "authoring XML using DHTML views and XSLT."[2]
Microsoft initially released InfoPath as part of Microsoft Office 2003 family. In summer 2010, Microsoft released a new version that split InfoPath into two applications: InfoPath Designer 2010 is used to create forms and define data structures, and InfoPath Filler 2010 is used to fill out and submit forms.
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InfoPath, a member of Office products, features a different usage scenario from the other applications, such as Word and Excel. In order to use InfoPath to fill in a form, a user must have a designer develop an InfoPath template first.
All the data stored in InfoPath forms are stored in an XML format, which is referred to as the "data source".
InfoPath provides several controls (e.g. Textbox, Radio Button, Checkbox, etc.) to present data in the data source to end users. For data tables and secondary data sources, "Repeating Table" and other repeating controls are introduced. For each of these controls, actions (called "rules") can be bound in. A rule defines a specific action that will be performed under certain conditions. For example, a simple rule could be: "Set field 'Total' to 100 when number in field 'field1' changes".
More complex actions can be developed through "data validation". Of course, data validation can also be done with VBA programming inside a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet.
The most common usage of InfoPath is to integrate it with Microsoft SharePoint technology using InfoPath Form Services (included in the enterprise commercial version of MOSS) or as the separate Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 product.
In SharePoint, a "Form Library" can be created and developed by using InfoPath. InfoPath fields will be exported as "Columns" in the library and can be directly read in SharePoint or be used as part of web services results in workflow development.
| Version | Notes | Release date[3] |
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| InfoPath 2003 | Included only in Microsoft Office 2003 Professional and Professional Enterprise Edition (Volume license only) and sold separately | November 19, 2003 |
| InfoPath 2007 | Included in Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate and the volume license editions, Professional Plus, Enterprise, and sold separately | January 27, 2007 |
| InfoPath 2010 | Included in Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus | July 15, 2010 |
All release dates pertain to the general availability release date. Release to manufacturing is usually two or three months in advance.
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