InfoPath vs. XForms

November 06, 2003 | 1 Comments

I spent most of today in “SharePoint boot camp”. We learned a bit about SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Office 2003 and how they all relate to each other. All in all they seem like some pretty nifty applications, but I’m not sure if they’d ever be worth deploying in most organizations. It just seems like way to much for an end user to take in and make use of, as if enough technology isn’t thown at them as it is and this stuff isn’t easy to learn. SharePoint’s default interfaces are a nightmare. I was lost 80% of the time.

But, anyway, there is some cool stuff there, I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it. I am sorry to report that FrontPage is alive and well and a big part of SharePoint. Eww.

In any case, I found my self tinkering around with Office more than anything and in regards to XML it seems to be fairly promising. I know, I know, it’s Microsoft and all that, but it’s a fact of life, and it did look pretty good in many ways. Better anyway. Basically, there seems to be some pretty forward-thinking improvements in there that will help it “plug and play” with the rest of the world. A custom schema, little XSL, a little CSS and your out of Microsoft land.

Which brings me to InfoPath, which to be honest, I’d only heard of in passing before today. I played around with it quite a bit, as I can see how it could solve some pressing business issues that seem to pop up with frequency.

Naturally I was curious about it and almost instantly wondered how it related and compared to XForms.

Well, the basic answer isn’t too surprising. It’s pretty much XForms Microsoftized. If your organization is Microsoft-centric, you’re committed to Office 2003 and you don’t need to have transaction outside of that framework, InfoPath would be great for you, as I’m sure would some other solution involving XForms. If on the other-hand you need to be flexible or support various platforms you might want to forget you ever heard of it.

I did a tad bit of research on this today and rather than reiterate too much of what I found, I’ll refer you to XFoms and Microsoft InfoPath by Micah Dubinko. He sums it all up far better than I ever could.

Filed under: Web Development