I have been asked enough times now about the licensing requirements of SharePoint to be able to show InfoPath forms in the browser that I’m finally putting together this blog entry about it . With InfoPath 2010, you can create SharePoint Form Library Forms, SharePoint List Forms and SharePoint Workflow Forms. Let me try to break down each of these briefly and talk about the licensing requirements.

SharePoint Form Library Forms

InfoPath’s ability to create form templates that can be posted to a form library in SharePoint dates back to to 2003 when InfoPath 2003 first came out. Once the form is published to that library, your users can click on the New Document link/button and that will open up the form. This form can only be opened in the browser if you have SharePoint Enterprise license. No exceptions here. If you don’t have enterprise licensing on your server then your users will require at least the InfoPath filler application (or InfoPath Designer application) on their machine to open up the form. If that’s not the case either, they will get an error saying that no compatible application can be found to open up the form (just like the error you would get if you didn’t have MS Word installed and you tried to open up a .doc document).

SharePoint List Forms

This functionality is new in 2010 products. SharePoint lists (such as Tasks, Announcements, Links etc.) come out of the box with ASP.NET forms that let you take actions on the list (viewing a list item, editing an item, creating a new item). You can see these forms in the browser or through SharePoint Designer 2010. If your SharePoint server has SharePoint Enterprise license, you can modify these out of the box forms or create new forms (recommended) using InfoPath 2010. If you don’t have enterprise licensing, you can still customize or create new list forms without code. However, you will need to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to do that and the resulting forms will be ASP.NET forms as well.

SharePoint Workflow Forms

This functionality is also new in 2010 products. When you create a workflow using SharePoint Designer 2010, it creates forms that users interact with as needed (for example task forms, initiation forms, association forms, forms to collect data from users etc.). If your SharePoint server has SharePoint Enterprise or Standard license applied to it, you can use InfoPath 2010 to modify these forms. If you are instead running SharePoint Foundation, you can still modify these forms, but that would have to be done using SharePoint Designer 2010 and the forms will be ASP.NET forms.

I hope this breakdown eliminates some confusion. InfoPath 2010 is an Awesome product! If you have the proper licensing, I would definitely recommend using it!

The InfoPath 2010 Training DVD-ROM containing all of our video tutorials on InfoPath 2010 has now been released. This DVD contains demonstrations showing you exactly how you can build form solutions using InfoPath 2010 by itself or on SharePoint 2010… without using any programming! Here are some of the topics you will learn by watching the videos on this DVD:

• Introduction to InfoPath 2010
• Convert Word and Excel forms to InfoPath
• Enhance forms using Validation and Formatting
• Fetch data from SharePoint Lists and Databases into your forms
• Publish form templates to form library
• Publish forms using content type
• Create SharePoint list forms using InfoPath

• and more…

To celebrate the release of this DVD, we are offering a $20 discount to the first 20 people who purchase the Single User license DVD. Once at the checkout page, enter the coupon code INF2010DVD (please remember to click the Apply button to apply the discount to the price)

The complete list of all videos and purchase information are available on the site: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/products/

The Customize Form button in the List Settings page lets you customize the list form using InfoPath 2010 (if InfoPath 2010 is installed on your computer and you are running SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise). If this button is not working, your site is not trusted by your computer and that’s why it is not letting you open up the form in InfoPath. Check out the animated image below to see how you can add your site as a trusted site.

The InfoPath 2010 Video page is now ready. We now have 13 videos already on the page and more to come in the future. Check it out here:

http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/infopath-2010/

Topics include the following:

• Introduction to InfoPath 2010
• Converting Microsoft Word documents to InfoPath 2010
• Enhance InfoPath 2010 form with Rules (Validation, Formatting and Action Logic)
• Use cascading drop-downs in InfoPath to display parent-child information
• Create a SharePoint List form using InfoPath
• Publish InfoPath form through a site Content Type
• Fetch data from Databases and SharePoint Lists into InfoPath form
• And more…

I have always been a big fan of InfoPath and all the possibilities that it offers. We already have a bunch of videos demonstrating some very cool functionality within InfoPath here: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/infopath/. A ton more videos will be created in the future for InfoPath 2010 to show you all that it can do.

Aside from all that InfoPath can do, you can of course put code behind the forms to extend it a lot further. However, my recommendation to my clients and students has always been to look at all of the other possibilities first before jumping into code because once you do go that route, there is no turning back. Also, the management of code requires a developer and most times that means that it creates a bottleneck for fixing any current bugs and implementing new features. If the original form designer, hopefully the business analyst with the business knowledge, can take ownership of fixing the issues and extending the functionality as needed, the process is usually a whole lot smoother and faster.

To that end, I would like to introduce you to Qdabra qRules. Think of this as packaged features that you can just turn ON in your forms – plug and play! Qdabra qRules lets you use rules in place of code to quickly add common features to your InfoPath forms. qRules 2.1 (the most recent release) contains 25 of the most commonly requested functions accessible via rules—even things that aren’t available in InfoPath today like encrypting fields.

Functions in Qdabra qRules include:

• Password Protect – Hide sensitive data using client-side encryption
• Format Date – Format your dates from SharePoint or SQL and show just the year, month, or day
• Get Week Day – Get the date value for a day of the week and improve your forms’ usefulness. Use Get Week Day in an open rule to quickly calculate the date for a weekday and populate your form based on it
• Input Parameters View Switching – copy Input Parameters to your main data source on load and use to switch views (codeless!)
• Submit To SharePoint List – Submit your XML form to a SharePoint list—now browser compatible
• Copy Table – from secondary source of main data source
• Set Value – filter target value
• Generate GUID, Sort Table, Save To SharePoint, and more

Here is some additional information about qRules:

• Patrick Halstead’s blog post: InfoPath Forms 101: Codeless = Less Cost
• qRules product page: http://www.qdabra.com/en/products/qRules.aspx
• qRules Encryption Template Part: http://www.infopathdev.com/files/folders/qrules/entry53061.aspx

If you are an avid user and a fan of InfoPath, IMHO you would be doing a disservice to yourself and your company by not checking out this product since it can make your current processes much much easier!

If you have worked with the XSLT Data View web part before, you know how much power it has. You can point to virtually any repository of data (web services, databases, xml files, SharePoint lists and libraries etc) and bring it into SharePoint. The data gets retrieved as standard XML and you can modify it to look however you like using SharePoint Designer 2007 without having to do any coding whatsoever! Here is a snapshot of a Data View web part showing information from a database table.

When connecting to the database, there are a couple of options for authentication. The first one (and the one that’s shown in most of the demonstrations ) is by supplying it database credentials. Making the connection this way assures that only these credentials would be used by this web part… always! Meaning, no matter who is viewing this web part (reader, administrator or someone in the middle), they will all get the same experience. More often than not, this is not the user experience that organizations want. They want the user experience to be dependent on the user’s access level. For example, a sales person in the organization should be able to view the sales revenue data while an IT analyst should not. To make that happen, you need to configure the Single Sign On functionality which comes built into SharePoint Server. Single Sign On in SharePoint simply means that once the user logs on to their machine, SharePoint will take care of supplying their credentials to the backend applications or databases that the user needs access to. The image below shows how the Data View web part can utilize single sign on to access a database.

Want to see how the process works from end to end – configuring SSO and utilizing it in the Data View web part? Check out our free video of the week on Configuring Single Sign On. Enjoy!

While teaching the InfoPath/Workflow class last week, I had the need to restrict a textbox control in an InfoPath form to only contain emails. If an invalid email is inserted, it should throw a validation error. Out of the box, the patterns provided by InfoPath are very limited. It only provides patterns for Phone Number, SSN, and Zip code:

I thought surely somewhere out on the web I would find the pattern needed for this, but to my surprise, I couldn’t find “a working one” (doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, but I just couldn’t find one after an extensive search). Here are the ones I did find and either they just didn’t work or were limiting in nature:

• http://bharatsukhwal2000.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CDD1BF7F2239C3B!213.entry
• http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/29731834/email-fomatting-pattern.aspx
• http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/p/2868/6062.aspx

So I ended up creating a simple pattern myself:

.+@.+\..+

This might not catch All types of invalid emails, but it does catch quite a lot of them. Hope this post helps someone experiencing the same frustration as I did last week.