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Introducing Microsoft InfoPath 2003 part 1: reduce your ''mountain of paper''. (Data Management).

Article Excerpt
A few weeks ago I was meeting with the CIO of a local health care customer and his IT staff. They were explaining the various technology initiatives and projects that were occurring over the next year. What the CIO was the most proud of was that he had declared this a year of integration projects.

He had followed the IT trends closely and was seeing that now was the time to ride the Web services wave. With the release of Visual Studio .NET and Windows Server 2003 he felt comfortable in the platform. He and his staff were focused almost exclusively on the development and deployment of a Web services architecture to tie their back-end hospital systems and other various customer-facing systems together. The main goal he had dangled to his board was that he could reduce cost and increase efficiency through process automation and back-end integration. He had explained to them that Web services provide a clean and easy way to tie together their various back-end systems regardless of platforms.

As the CIO described it, their biggest remaining problem was the "mountain of paper" that had become the mainstay of their organization's daily life. Each piece of paper represented some portion of a vital health care process required for the hospital to function properly. They ranged from patient admission to nursing orders. It became clear through our conversation that ASP.NET combined with VB front-end applications wasn't the sole clear answer for front-end data collection. Web services clearly answered the back-end integration requirements, but there was still a definite need for off-line access and a quick and easy way for data collection. I explained that a new product called InfoPath 2003, which is part of the new Microsoft Office System 2003, was designed to solve that very problem. In the first part of this two-part series I'll show how you can use InfoPath and Web services to solve not only this CIO's problem but similar problems within your organization. In Part 2 I'll explore further ways that you can integrate InfoPath with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002 to create robust workflow applications.

The design goal of InfoPath 2003 is to streamline the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich dynamic forms. The real key to InfoPath is that the data collected can easily be shared and integrated with a variety of back-end business processes because of the native support of customer-defined XML. The use of XML as the basis of InfoPath provides a built-in reusability for XML-enabled applications. Additionally, InfoPath provides the native ability to consume XML Schemas, Web services, SQL, and Microsoft Access databases.

What is an InfoPath Solution?

By definition an InfoPath solution consists of either a form template or a set of files that are combined to provide the necessary semantic information to the InfoPath clients...

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