Publishing Your Form

After you are finished designing and testing your form, it is time to publish it to the users who will be filling out your form. This section looks at the different methods that are available for publishing your InfoPath forms. The goal of this part of the chapter is to introduce you to the different publishing methods and give you an introduction to each—the following chapters will be drilling down into the specifics of how each of these publishing methods works and how you can use each of them to distribute your forms to users.

Publishing to a Shared Folder

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With this ease of use comes a trade-off—this publishing method does not provide an easy way to organize forms or form data. Another disadvantage of this publishing method is that forms deployed to a shared location will not be able to take advantage of all the features InfoPath provides.

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Note

To successfully deploy fully trusted forms, you need to actually install the form on a user’s computer, which is discussed a little later in this chapter.

Publishing to a SharePoint Form Library

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After the user has finished filling out a form, they can save the form results back to the SharePoint form library. This information then can be consolidated into a datasheet, like the one shown in Figure 11-3.

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Tip

For more information on using InfoPath with SharePoint Portal Server, flip ahead to Chapter 12.

Publishing to a Web Server

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You could even create your own web pages with links to the different forms that are available, but you would need to manually maintain this “front end” to your forms, which still does not provide a way to consolidate and/or display the data being collected.

Note

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Installing Custom Forms Locally

Another option for installing InfoPath forms is to install them locally on the user’s machine. This method of form distribution allows you to create fully trusted forms that can access all the resources available on your local machine. Forms that have been installed using this method are sometimes also called custom-installed forms, because they appear on the Custom Installed Forms tab of the Forms dialog box when opening a form to fill out, as shown in Figure 11-4.

Figure 11-4: Custom-installed forms

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