Defining InfoPath

Microsoft InfoPath 2003 is a novel forms tool that uses a variety of XML technologies under the hood. InfoPath 2003 is intended primarily for use in an enterprise environment to enable data collection with greater completeness and accuracy than many existing approaches. Additionally, InfoPath 2003 makes use of several industry standards, many of which are based on XML (Extensible Markup Language).

InfoPath 2003 is part of the Office System 2003 suite of applications and, not surprisingly, shares many visual similarities to other Office System 2003 programs, including the task pane, which is used for a variety of form design and form-filling purposes. So, InfoPath should feel like a fairly familiar environment for both form designers and users who are acquainted with recent versions of Microsoft Office programs.

Business Problems InfoPath Can Address

In modern businesses, there is great pressure to efficiently monitor the status of the business and individual projects. To carry out efficient monitoring and to make appropriate business decisions based on available data, it is important that data collection is efficient, complete, and accurate.

In considering how these three aspects of data collection can be improved, I will take as a case study a safety inspector on offshore oil installations. The safety inspector carries out inspections of offshore oil production facilities on a set schedule. He presently collects data in a Microsoft Word document stored on his laptop computer. He prints a copy of the information gathered for the offshore installation's records. After he returns to headquarters, an additional printed copy of his data is entered into corporate data systems.

The current approach is fairly inefficient, as it has no way to flag missing data automatically and lacks any way to catch errors in data entry, other than by the human eye. When the printed form is being re-keyed at headquarters, the possibility of introducing new errors is always present. InfoPath 2003 offers ways to address each of these potential problems of data collection.

Improving the Efficiency of Data Collection

InfoPath forms could be used on the safety inspector's laptop during each visit to the offshore oil installation. InfoPath form templates' ability to save forms to disk offers functionality absent from traditional HTML forms, which must be filled in while connected online. This availability of forms offline means that data collection is carried out by the safety inspector during each of the necessary safety checks.

With InfoPath, the data is ready to be submitted as XML as soon as the data is complete and the safety inspector has a connection to the Internet, or when he returns to headquarters. Whichever way of submitting InfoPath form data is chosen , the inefficiency of re-keying at headquarters is avoided.

Improving the Completeness of Data Collection

In complex safety checks, many sections of a form created in Word will be used only occasionally, when a particular combination of circumstances occur. This means that many sections of a form might be intended to be blank. However, blank parts of a form increase the chances of skipping parts of the form that are blank but ought to have been filled in, because there is no easy way in Word to distinguish intentionally blank areas from missing data.

In InfoPath form templates, form controls intended to capture core data can be displayed at all times. Missing data can be identified automatically by the business logic behind the form template. So, the safety inspector can be alerted to missing data at the time the data is collected.

InfoPath also features conditional formatting of parts of the form. This means that form controls that are intended to collect data needed only in some circumstances can be programmed to display only when those circumstances occur. The display of these initially hidden parts of the form is a visual reminder to the safety inspector that additional data is needed in the circumstances indicated by data already collected.

These features help avoid omissions in data collection while the safety inspector is on site.

Improving the Accuracy of Data Collection

InfoPath form templates provide three techniques of data validation ”using W3C XML Schema, using rules specified using the InfoPath interface, and using rules created in JScript and VBScript code.

W3C XML Schema allows, for example, type errors to be identified automatically. The InfoPath form visually indicates potential validation errors for data in relevant form controls.

These three validation techniques reduce the chances of incorrect data being submitted into corporate business processes. Situations in which, for example, a price might be incorrectly inserted into a form control for the order date can be identified automatically. Of course, certain types of errors can't be readily identified. For example, if the name of a staff member is Joe Doe, nothing in validation constraints prevents a user from entering Peter Smith in the corresponding form control.

However, taken as a whole, InfoPath form templates can improve the efficiency of data collection, identify missing data, and identify certain classes of data error. These improvements potentially make InfoPath a very useful tool for the collection of business data, particularly when corresponding back-end processes are capable of using XML data.

Let's install InfoPath and put it to work for a couple of basic tasks in preparation for a more detailed look at InfoPath in Chapter 2, "InfoPath Is Different."