SharePoint Dragons

Nikander & Margriet on SharePoint

No more InfoPath forms in SharePoint 2013 workflows

5 Comments Posted by on October 11, 2012

It’s a remarkable move that InfoPath forms are no longer used in workflows. InfoPath in combination with Forms Services is a great platform that makes it quite easy to create robust and nice looking web forms. We’ve found that one of the places where InfoPath really shines was within SharePoint workflows. InfoPath forms are rendered to HTML by Forms Services, running as a service within your SharePoint farm. To us, this is just another example of the clear trend where Microsoft tries to move custom code outside of your SharePoint environment.

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5 responses to “No more InfoPath forms in SharePoint 2013 workflows”

  1. Alexander Gorlach October 23, 2012 at 8:56 am

    It is just another example why investment in code for SharePoint is very unreliable.

    Reply
  2. hank November 14, 2012 at 8:23 pm

    I’m not sure that infopath so great tool. I and my colleagues stopped using infopath long time ago. Just we had to much headache with it’s unstable work. We created forms designer tool for ourselves, but now it is accessible for everyone to try. It works on SharePoint Foundation also well. Check this site http://spform.com. This tool can really make your life easier.

    Reply
    • Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman November 15, 2012 at 8:51 am

      We’ve heard this more often. We would agree that normal asp.net pages are faster, but we’re still quite enthousiastic about InfoPath in the correct scenarios. In our experience, and we have lots of it with InfoPath/Forms Services, it’s easy to build a stable and professional looking solution that ranges from being simple to moderate. We really liked InfoPath forms in workflows, and if you don’t have InfoPath, what are you gonna say when end users want to create their own forms? We don’t think there is a product out there that makes the last thing that easy (but we’re open to suggestions)!

      Reply
  3. Christos K December 11, 2012 at 4:43 pm

    I’ve bought two books for infopath and my impression is that Infopath is a great tool, until you start using it in a real scenario. The luck of adding controls and the cumbersome programming style are shining out. I wished that Microsoft would invest in this direction, but no, it cripples it, just like xslt.

    Reply
    • Nikander & Margriet Bruggeman December 13, 2012 at 9:48 am

      Well, we’ve certainly done our share of real scenarios, and have used InfoPath to our satisfaction. We do feel that, just like the SSRS product, there is a certain complexity level within a form, and once you reach that, InfoPath is no longer the ideal tool. We guess you;ve reached that barrier inm your project.

      Reply

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