Solution Providers Find InfoPath Quick, Easy

But solution providers that have begun working with the product give it high marks for its ability to help them rapidly develop and deploy solutions, thanks to the use of XML, Web services and the familiar client interface.

"One of the advantages of a Microsoft InfoPath solution is its very quick front end," said Leian Royce, business analyst at Sagestone Consulting, Grand Rapids, Mich. "For businesses that need something very quick, InfoPath is a good solution."

In just six weeks, the solution provider developed an InfoPath-based solution to help Cooper Tire and Rubber keep track of the hundreds of molds it uses at its four tire-manufacturing plants.

The Findlay, Ohio-based tire maker had different legacy applications at each of its four plants for tracking hundreds of molds, and it had no way to track molds being shuffled between plants. Managers were faxing, e-mailing and making phone calls to track down molds, and sometimes they had to physically search for them.

The company looked into a consolidation of legacy systems and turned to Sagestone to develop a "proof of concept" pilot that would give employees a global view and tracking capability for all of its molds.

Sagestone solved Cooper Tire's problem with six InfoPath forms and 15 Web services, while consolidating two legacy mainframes on Oracle databases.

"The system we built wasn't a simple time-off request form," Royce said. "We went out of the boundary. We're retrieving data, sending data, validating data %85 to multiple systems," he said.

The only hiccup was that it worked so well, Cooper Tire decided to move from "proof of concept" to a rollout at all four of its plants, and Sagestone had to scramble to get training materials ready, Royce said. But the InfoPath solution is proving to be a good tool to help Cooper Tire with a transition to a new client/server solution, while remaining a part of the final solution.

"InfoPath does not present a rich user experience, and if you need a fancy client/server system, it isn't the tool. But there's a place for it," Royce said.

Ashif Jiwani, senior manager and an alliance manager for Microsoft health-care solutions at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young (CGEY), had a similar experience when developing an InfoPath solution to replace paper forms and clipboards for emergency room nursing staff at Swedish Hospital in Seattle.

"It was so quick that people were flabbergasted," Jiwani said of the six-week project, which went live as a pilot in November. "The [hospital's] CIO would refuse to believe it until it happened."

In this case, the Seattle office of CGEY deployed InfoPath on a wireless tablet PC that tied into a server, where patient records were centrally stored and managed in Microsoft's SharePoint Services application.

Among the benefits: Nurses will no longer need to hunt down clipboards, and the hospital's lab and imaging units no longer need to wait for patient records to be hand-delivered while patients cooled their heels in the waiting room. Hospital staff also spends less time filling out forms.

Jiwani said the hospital has delayed moving the solution into full production while it studies the potential to extend it beyond nursing staff.

He also said that, in a future stage, the hosptial willl be able to link the XML-based records produced by InfoPath forms into the hospital's clinical medical records and billing systems. Jiwani said tools like InfoPath, along with Microsoft's middleware, can tie systems together, bridging the gap between clinical systems from providers, such as McKesson and Cerner, and front-office systems.

"What's missing is something [like InfoPath] in the middle to really take advantage of both systems to enable workflow to happen," Jiwani said.

InfoPath also eased the transition from paper to the tablet PC because of the familiarity people have with the Microsoft Office interface.

"It was a great transition," Jiwani said. "With some of the people, it took just 10 minutes to get used to [InfoPath]."

Mobile deployments, such as the CGEY rollout at Swedish Hospital, are where Microsoft is getting some early traction with InfoPath, said Tim Hickernell, vice president at Meta Group. While enterprises have yet to adopt Microsoft Office 2003 in broad numbers, InfoPath brings rich-forms capability to mobile workers, he said.

Also, this spring Microsoft released upgrades to InfoPath that improved the way it works with pen input, as well as enhanced its ability to import XML schema, print forms, handle digital signatures and integrate with Visual Studio.

Still, InfoPath adoption may remain somewhat limited until enterprises begin upgrading to Office 2003 and develop Web-services enabled infrastructures.

"It's only a form," Hickernell said. "It's not the rest of the infrastructure involved in a forms automated system. It's not the forms server and the workflow."