Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 39: Using Microsoft Office InfoPath with SharePoint Products and Technologies 1043
A user can visit the form library to fill out new forms based on the form template.
When the user completes the form, InfoPath automatically saves the resulting
form directly to the form library. The user can later revisit the form library to edit
existing forms.
Storing InfoPath forms in the form library provides the ability to use additional
Windows SharePoint Services functionality, such as form library columns and merging
forms. The form library also makes the exposed form information available for
searching as part of the SharePoint site.
Form library columns are populated with data extracted from the specified
fields in the forms stored in the form library. This allows users to view information
without having to open and view each form (Figure 39-4). Form library columns
also provide a way to sort and group forms according to their content. With these
columns, the user can create custom views to organize the forms and their content
within the form library. For example, if you stored your team’s expense reports in a
form library, the form library columns could display the employee’s name, the business
purpose, and the total expenses claimed. This would be displayed for each
form in the form library, as shown in Figure 39-4. You could then sort the expense
reports by any column, such as business purpose, or filter the reports by, for
instance, employee name.
Merging forms provides the ability to aggregate forms data by merging several
forms into a single form. For example, you can merge several individual expense
reports into the summary report. A form designer can define how the data in various
fields should be merged in the resulting document.
The following sections describe how to perform various tasks using form
libraries as well as the InfoPath forms that these libraries store.
Creating a Form Library
You can create a form library from InfoPath or from a SharePoint site. In any case,
to create form libraries, you must have permission to modify the site where the form
library will be stored.
Creating a form library from InfoPath
InfoPath includes the Publishing Wizard that provides an ability to publish form
templates to shared locations on your computer or company network, to a Share-
Point 2003 site, or to a Web server. To create a form library from InfoPath, perform
the following steps:
1. Open the form template in InfoPath design mode.
2. On the File menu, select Publish. Alternatively, click Publish Form in the
Design Tasks pane. The InfoPath Publishing Wizard starts. On the Welcome
page, click Next.