Rethinking Infopath

I have to admit, that lately (largely due to the preparation I’ve been doing for the Smart Client UG Tour in Canada) I’ve been rethinking InfoPath – mostly because I’m finding more and more deployment tricks and integration methods with other blocks and scenarios (For example, InfoPath exposes RegisterSolution that allows you to register a form on the local computer – this could be called by the Updater Block post processing routines for example).  I still have a problem with the fact that there is no Infopath reader from Microsoft – an Infopathlite if you will… and that the deployment of Infopath itself is quite “heavy” without going into the discussion of the deployment of service packs (etc).  But for customers who have Office 2003 and the deployment/update problem solved – I could see InfoPath as being a truly important piece of the Information worker’s toolkit.  What is lacking in so many organizations, in my opinion, is the goo that Infopath needs on the back end – such as BizTalk, well built SOA’s – etc.  Additionally, if you want to have Infopath used offline, you need to jump through some hoops – in much the same way you would jump through those same hoops with the typical home grown smart client app (you still need async submission, guaranteed delivery, queued architecture to do this correctly).

Anyway – random thought… nothing more.