Microsoft Infopath Tutorial and Online Training Course

Microsoft InfoPath Tutorial: Section 4 Overview

In this section, you will learn about:

• Publishing a form template
• Troubleshooting publishing problems

Distributing Forms

Publishing a Form Template

In order to make a form template available to users who need to fill out the form, you must publish it to a shared location, such as a network folder, a Microsoft SharePoint Portal, or a Web server. Keep in mind, however, that users must still have InfoPath installed on their computers in order to fill out the form.

To publish a form:

1. From the File menu, select Publish.

The Publishing Wizard opens:

1. Click Next.
2. Select where you want to publish the form:

1. Click Next.
2. On the next screen, the wizard prompts you to enter a location and a name for the form. The fields vary depending on the type of location you selected. For example, the screen below shows the fields you complete when publishing a form to a shared folder:

When publishing to a SharePoint Portal, the wizard asks you to either create a new library or modify an existing one. Complete the steps as necessary to define the location of the published form and to give it a name.

1. On the last screen of the wizard, confirm the location and click Finish.

Once you a publish a form, there’s no need to republish it, even if you make changes. You can simply resave the form using the Save button, since the location is already stored.

Troubleshooting Publishing Problems

InfoPath’s wizards generally make it easy to publish and access forms. However, if you encounter problems, try the following tips:

• First, make sure all your users have InfoPath installed on their computers. They won’t be able to fill out a form if they don’t.
• Make sure you publish the form to a shared location. If this is a directory on your computer, use the full universal naming convention (UNC), including the name of your computer. For example: \\Name\Directory\Form.xsn.
• Make sure your users have permission to write to the folder where you’ve published the form.
• If you’re trying to publish a form to a Web server, make sure Microsoft WebDAV is enabled on the server. This is required for remote authoring.
• Make sure you’ve included all the necessary resource files in your form. For example, you may have used another .XML file to populate a secondary data source. If you haven’t included that file as a resource, users will need to be able to access that file, as well, meaning it must be available in a shared location.
• If users are warned about cross-domain data access, it’s because one of the data sources for the form wasn’t published to the same domain as the form. To avoid these problems, publish both the form and its data sources to the same domain.
• If you’ve updated the form template, make sure you’ve published it to the same location. Otherwise, users may encounter errors when trying to open forms based on the earlier template. If you encounter errors opening a form template, try opening it in design mode by right-clicking on the template and selecting Design from the shortcut menu. Then republish the form.

Microsoft InfoPath Tutorial: Section 4 Review

In this section, you learned about:

• Publishing a form template
• Troubleshooting publishing problems