Experience developing standalone SharePoint solutions with InfoPath?
With the widespread adoption of SharePoint 2007 on my current client, there are more and more questions about filling out forms offline, which then sync up when they are online.
This is similar to what Microsoft built for InfoPath, so my (completely untested) thought is we have an InfoPath forms library that users connect to their Outlook client, so they have forms locally when they submit offline. They can then open them at their leisure, fill them in, and save the result. Then they go back to the Internet ...
... and then some magic happens ...
... and the form data is saved in the SharePoint list.
So, naturally, I need to figure out what this magic is, but do you have any hints, pointers, or war stories about InfoPath / SharePoint integration that you can use?
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I have some war stories around using InfoPath Forms Services for internal users who have access to SharePoint along with the InfoPath thick client for external users who don't have access to SharePoint. A smoothed solution that involved sending e-mail to the form to external users and back to the SharePoint library, but bug fixes were needed to fix the issues.
This is probably not relevant to your solution, but one problem immediately arises: InfoPath Forms Services requires the XML to have an HREF attribute pointing to the template, but this is not used on the client - in fact, the client is discarded by the client, causing the Forms explosion Services. An event handler in the form library had to be written to return the HREF back.
Update - I forgot to mention that some of my notes on InfoPath (many of which relate to offline use) can be found on our SharePoint wiki here: http://wiki.threewill.com/display/enterprise/InfoPath+Notes
For what it's worth, we also used Groove with this solution (Groove with InfoPath Forms Services and InfoPath client).
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You can use MS Groove for offline collaboration that will sync with SharePoint:
Microsoft Office 2007 Document: Groove and SharePoint Integration
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