Eforms SP2010 Standard Edition and MS Office 2010 professional

Question

We have the following licensed products

1. SharePoint 2010 Standard
2. Microsoft Office 2010 Professional
3. Visual Studio 2010 Professional

Our Requirement Now our requirement is to create E-Forms for example when a new employee joins the organization the IT Department initiates a "ID Creation" form. The form contains lets suppose 4 Sections and each section will be filled by different person(s) and others will find that section disabled/locked...and its kinda 4 layers approval workflow until the ID gets created.

On my IT department page I want to create a link called "ID Creation Form" ..when department user will click it should bring the form ..user will fill it in and sort of workflow will start...

To achieve this what are our options based on the product licenses we have and how we can utilize the products to achieve it..I've heard we cannot use INFOPATH for forms library and publish as its only available on Enterprise Edition. In my scenario what are the combinations to achieve my requirement.

Answer 1

With InfoPath you have two options, you can use client based forms which uses the user's local InfoPath client or you can do web based forms which uses the Forms Services included with the Enterprise features. If everyone will have InfoPath on their desktop, the client based forms are still viable. In addition to the forms, you would need the workflow created as well using either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.

Alternatively you can create custom forms using VS, though this takes a developer and may be more difficult. If you were doing the custom forms in Visual Studio, then you would also likely deploy the workflows using Visual Studio.