Jean Paoli, the architect of Microsoft Office's XML capabilities, recently spent several hours showing me Microsoft's newest Office family member, InfoPath (formerly XDocs, originally NetDocs). Here are 10 things you should know about this revolutionary piece of software.
1. You use it to gather and view semi-structured information.
The most obvious example of such data-gathering is the business form. While acknowledging the marketing need to brand InfoPath as a forms application, Paoli insists -- rightly -- that there is more to the story. To the user, InfoPath is a general-purpose viewer and editor of business information. To the developer, it's a power tool for building applications that view, edit, and transform XML data.
2. Users create and maintain high-quality data.
Like Office 11 and Excel 11, InfoPath can bind an XML Schema to a document, can interactively validate the document against the schema, and can prevent the user from saving the document in an invalid state. In addition to schema constraints, you can attach extra validation rules. For this purpose, the InfoPath design mode includes an XPath-aware expression builder.
3. It is aggressively standards-based.
Word 11 can save formatted documents in an XML format called WordML, or it can save schematized data without formatting as generic XML. Although these two modes are both standard in their use of XML, they are nevertheless quite distinct from one another. In the latter case you use XSLT to apply the WordML styling to a core of pure structured data, but it's optional.
With InfoPath, XSLT isn't an option. The document's core of structured data is always expressed through one or more views, and those views are XSLT transformations. InfoPath's more unified model does not derive from Word, but rather from Paoli's former project, Internet Explorer. In an InfoPath document, formatted text is expressed as XHTML (the schema for which must be bound to the document), and all styling is accomplished by means of standard CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
InfoPath also provides a DOM (Document Object Model) accessible to scripting languages such as VBScript and JavaScript.
4. It connects people to business processes.
As SOAP packets wend their way through business workflows, people need to open them up, look at them, think about them, interact with them, and inject them back into the workflows. InfoPath aims to support that interaction in a way that's completely natural for the user, but sacrifices none of the fidelity of the XML data on which Web services depend.
5. It embraces both centralized and peer-to-peer workflow.
