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Yesterday, I received my advanced copy of the new edition of Designing Electronic Forms for SharePoint and InfoPath. This is a 1000 page book which does exactly what the title suggests. It's a guide on how to use InfoPath to design electronic forms, both for SharePoint and the InfoPath client. The first...

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to get two Visio diagrams to interact on a SharePoint page. Now I’m going to bring that discussion back round to my favourite Microsoft product. How can an InfoPath form talk to a Visio diagram? Visio is a great tool for drawing detailed diagrams, potentially...

One of the nice features of InfoPath is the ability to convert existing Word or Excel forms into InfoPath forms, potentially saving you a lot of time. When you load up InfoPath Designer 2010, you are first presented with the options of all the form templates you can design. One is labelled Convert Existing...

With the 2010 version, a lot of work has been done to tighten up the integration between SharePoint and InfoPath. One example of this is workflow initiation forms. One of the things you can now do with SharePoint 2010 is create reusable SharePoint Designer workflows that aren’t attached to a specific...

This video shows the new web part in SharePoint 2010. It's now easy to embed an InfoPath form as a web part within a SharePoint page.

There's no point reinventing the wheel. Rather than sitting down myself to create a demo of this wonderful new feature you can get by combining SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010, I thought I'd link you to this video put together by the InfoPath 2010 team. http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2009...

Given that I spent a ridiculously long time trying to get an InfoPath form to interact with a spreadsheet published through Excel Services, I thought this was a suitable subject for a blog post. If I stop someone else feeling like they want to beat themselves to death with their own keyboard, I will...

I'm continuing my series of how to videos by showing how to create a read-only view. There are several reasons why you might wish to do this, the most common being that you want to have forms that cannot be altered after a process has been completed. This principle can be expanded to create multiple...

I’d like to continue talking about the use of InfoPath in the real world by talking about Children’s Electronic Social Care Record. If you’ve been following local events in the UK over the past months, you may be aware that we’ve had some problems in identifying children who are at risk and working to...

Another simple scenario where SharePoint and InfoPath can work together to make life easier. A SharePoint dashboard which monitors stock levels is linked to an InfoPath form for ordering new stock, which kicks of a workflow to get the prodcuts delivered.

Another scenario where InfoPath and SharePoint can aid business processes. In this demo, an employee fills out a budget request form, which is ammended by a manager and the results tracked using key performance indicators.

This is a short demo showing a potential scenario for InfoPath and SharePoint workflows improving common processes. In this demo, an employee requests holiday, their manager reviews and approves the request, and then the holiday is added to a SharePoint team calendar.

I’ve had a request to expand on my post about generating automatic numbers for InfoPath forms. I was asked to go into more detail about how to set up a SharePoint list to act as a counter. Go to the SharePoint site where you have your document library and create a custom list by the standard process...

I’ve had someone ask me about automatically giving InfoPath forms a unique number. The scenario in question was one where the forms were being saved to a SharePoint document library with a unique number attached. Documents in a SharePoint library do get given an ID, which is unique within document...

I’d like to make a sweeping generalisation about how people react to technology. Disregarding for the moment the variations and exceptions, I believe that people go through four phases. Phase 1: What the heck do I do with it? Phase 2: Wow! That’s amazing! Phase 3: There’s this one little annoying...

When you load up InfoPath forms in a browser, do you see this message? Probably. The important question is, for how long? Does the form open in a couple of seconds, or are you sitting waiting for minutes? There are various reasons why a form might be slow in loading up. In this blog post, I...

Continuing my series of how to demos. I had a request to do a video showing how to show red, yellow, green indicators based on values from a database. Yesterday, I posted a demo showing how to set up indicators. Today, you get to see how to connect to a database. The procedure is the same to connect...

This video is a response to a request. The request was to show how to show indicators based on values taken from SQL. In this video, I showed how to set conditional formatting to show indicators based on the value in a field. In this example, the value was entered manually, but exactly the same process...

Continuing my "how to" series with this requested demo. In this video, I show how to embed an InfoPath form as a web part in a SharePoint page. If you have a request for a feature you'd like to see demonstrated, please leave a comment.

Continuing my series of "how to" videos, I show how to use conditional formatting to hide or show a section based on the values entered elsewhere in a form. Conditional formatting can be incredibly valuable when you're creating a long, complex form where people might need to fill out different...

This is my second post about real-world implementations of InfoPath. Again, I’m sticking close to home. Microsoft have certain processes around employee commitments. At the start of the year, we have meetings with our managers to come up with various commitments and ways to measure whether we’re achieving...

A couple of different people have asked me how to auto-populate the values in fields based on the username and values in external data sources. Those questions were the inspiration for this series of videos. I will show how to do simple but useful things in InfoPath. If there's something you'd like to...

This is the first of an ongoing series showing how InfoPath has been used in real-life situations. No matter how good the sales pitch is, there’s nothing like knowing that a product has actually helped organisations out. This first example is one that is pretty close to me. Microsoft have a lot of...

Continuing my series of short introductions to how SharePoint can be used to solve various business problems. This video touches on custom and out of the box workflows, as well as browser-enabled InfoPath forms.

One of the great things about InfoPath 2007 is that it allows people to design forms that can be opened in an internet browser. This means, if you have a SharePoint intranet, extranet or website, you can publish InfoPath forms to SharePoint and have people open up the forms even if they don’t have InfoPath...