Am I correct in understanding that an XML based form would allow
someone to open a form that I send them by e-mail, fill it out and then
send it back to me? If so, that is useful to me. I am a principal
investigator of a multicenter study. Currently I use forms that I
designed in Omniform but which I print out on paper and have
collaborators fill out. I or my assistant then has to enter the data
into a database. I would love to skip the paper step. Before I heard of
InfoPath I was considering using Omniform. For starters I could have my
assistant enter the data by using Omnioform filler. The only thing I
would need to do is establish the links between each fillable field and
the corresponding field in the database. One step further would be to
send the forms by e-mail to a collaborator as an omniform mailable
filler (either executable or html). I also understand that one could
post an omniform form to a site hosted by them in which data could be
filled in by a user accessing it through the browser. So given those
enticing possibilities, does InfoPath make it easier to accomplish my
wishes or does it enable wishes that I have not even yet conceived of.
I played around a little with InfoPath and one thing I did notice is
that it was really easy to develop a form by simply telling it which
Microsoft Access table it is based on. Furthermore, I saw the wonderful
tool of conditional formatting so that a particular question is only
asked of the respondent if it is relevant. However, if any of that
functionality means that the respondent needs to be running InfoPath on
their computer (as opposed to just have it in a browser or a downloaded
self-executing file) then I will not be able to take advantage of it.
Those are the kind of niceties that only work when a CIO chooses to
deploy a product across an organization.