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Salmon, a UK SharePoint Gold Partner have produced a case study of the solution they built for Endsleigh Insurance. This is a powerful web portal delivering a customised view to their customers and allowing Endsleigh to work with partner organisations. This solution has helped Endsleigh deliver a tailored...

InfoPath allows you to create forms with very sophisticated logic. Some of this can be done using the out of the box features and formulae but there is always the option to write custom code. I would not recommend using InfoPath if vast amounts of custom code are required (if you’re going to write lots...

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.

If you're a UK higher education student or staff member, you can get Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for the ridiculously cheap price of £38.95 - if you buy before 30th June 2009. Just go to The Ultimate Steal , register with your academic email address and buy online.

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...

This is part 8 in my series of introductions to InfoPath 2007. In this demo, I show the publishing wizard and how to share form templates with those who need to fill the forms out.

These are five of the main things that I think make InfoPath 2007 such a great piece of software. 1. Repeating Tables Unless a form has a ridiculous number of rows in a table, sooner or later, someone will have more items to enter than there are rows provided. Whether you’re listing items to claim...

Continuing my series of demonstrations introducing the capabilities of InfoPath 2007. This demo shows how easy it is to create a form that connects to a database to view records, update records and create records.

Continuing my introduction series, this demo shows InfoPath working with SharePoint workflows. Data entered