Friday 31 August 2007

Infopath 2007 Web enabled forms - Limitations

If you've used Infopath, you know that the greatest limitation that there was with Infopath 2003 was that you HAD to have Infopath installed.

With Sharepoint 2007 this is history. Web-enabled forms are doable (though you need to have SharePoint Enterprise).

Obvisouly a zero footprint client can never have the thick client functionality. This is like comparing OWA to Outlook. Both are relevant in their own scenarios. My opinion for this is the same as for Outlook, keep Infopath within office (or for the more complex forms), and the web-enabled forms for outside of the office. So when developing forms in InfoPath you need to keep in mind whether your forms will be web-enabled or not. For web-enabled forms there are a number of limitations. There is a list available from MS stating the limitations found here.

Friday 24 August 2007

Out of the office? Take SharePoint with you!

We have recently been investigating a great tool for SharePoint. This is the Colligo Contributor for SharePoint. It is a client side install, which allows any user to download whole SharePoint (or parts of ) sites locally, having a (thick client) interface which is virtually identical to the Sharepoint UI.

This will enable users to take any SharePoint sites / libraries they are currently working with, and keep working with these when they are out of the office. As soon as they are back in the office, the software automatically synchronizes everything back to the SharePoint server, so you don't have to upload everything manually. I think this is an invaluable tool for those who often work out of the office, or anywhere where there is no access to SharePoint.

As a bonus, there is an Outlook Add-In. This addin allows you to take lists offline (this time within Outlook). It basically works as above, but at a list level. The final touch is one is able to drag and drop emails from the inbox into a synched list, with all the email meta data (from, to, subject, recieved, priority etc) automatically, and then everything goes straight into SharePoint.

Defintely the best tool for SharePoint I've seen lately. Visit http://www.colligo.com for more information.