How is Microsoft going to replace InfoPath forms in SharePoint?

In January 2014, Microsoft announced that InfoPath 2013 would be the final version of its form building tool. According to Microsoft, industry trends and feedback from customers and partners made it clear that today’s businesses demand an intelligent, integrated forms experience that spans devices.

Microsoft is looking to make investments that allow you to easily design, deploy, and use intelligent, integrated forms across Office clients, servers, and services—forms that everyone can use on their PC, tablet, or phone. Their goal is to deliver tools that are flexible and agile, so you can quickly connect to your data and processes in new and exciting ways. Interestingly Microsoft has not announced a replacement just yet and still advises customers to use InfoPath. The InfoPath 2013 client application will be supported until April 2023. InfoPath forms services for SharePoint 2013 will be supported until April 2023 and InfoPath forms services in Office 365 will be supported until further notice.

InfoPath is an application for building complex business forms. In combination with SharePoint you can design, distribute and maintain forms in your organization. Users can use InfoPath forms services (of the client application InfoPath filler) to fill out the forms.

InfoPath allowed a business or power user to build forms. It enabled the use of external data sources, conditional formatting or, as a developer, the writing of code in forms. That said, InfoPath also had some limitations, so its demise isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In this post we will look at the alternatives to InfoPath.

Forms on SharePoint List (FoSL)

With FoSL there will be a button in the ribbon that enables the (power) user to modify the form in their browser. This will be a lightweight way of making modifications and can be compared to what is often done in InfoPath. It is still unclear if data connections or web service calls will be available. The first demo's of FoSL were very promising but the roadmap is somewhat unclear - there is no release date yet.

Using FoSL gives the power user an easy and quick way to modify their forms. Any business user with sufficient permissions could change the look of the form without installing additional (third party) software. The drawback is that is it still unclear what options will be available. The first demo's were able to edit list forms only and untrained users could do some harm with this solution.

Excel and Access Online services / forms

An already existing way of creating forms is by using Excel services. The forms on spreadsheets use a plain Excel worksheet as backend to store the data you enter. Each form is linked to one spreadsheet. Using Excel as backend makes it easy for business users to stay in their trusted environment. Everyone that can handle Excel can handle the data. When the data is in Excel it is a small step to create powerful visualizations with the data entered in the form. Compared to InfoPath, the Excel forms can only handle very basic logic and there is no option to brand the form.

Next to Excel there are also the Access Apps. You can use Access to build self contained apps with tables and relational data. Building forms is done within the Access application. Access forms can handle relational data and transactions and are rather easy to build, although this approach is not ideal for single lists. It is best suited for self contained apps.

Nintex forms

Nintex Forms is the forms solution of one of the big players in the SharePoint ecosystem. They have a web-based form designer where you can easily build your custom forms and publish them to your SharePoint environment. All these forms can be consumed on most mobile devices from the internet, anywhere and at any time. Nintex forms also integrate well with their Nintex Workflow solutions so that you can build nice forms around your business processes.

The forms solution is built on top of SharePoint so an additional client application is not needed as it uses the same technology as SharePoint. With Nintex forms no knowledge of HTML of JavaScript is needed to build forms and forms are built with drag and drop in the browser. Nintex is a third party tool and needs some investment effort but can have a quick ROI because of its ease of use.

Custom .NET forms

The options mentioned above don’t always fulfill user expectations. As developers it is possible to build custom forms with Visual Studio and publish them to your SharePoint environment. Within these forms all the available .NET libraries can be used on top of the one in the SharePoint object model. When complex forms are needed this is the way to go. Custom forms are highly extensible and reusable and within Visual Studio every technology can be used. As any custom made solution there is the concern about maintainability. Every feature request will result in the need of a developer. This is a major concern when outsourcing these custom form development tasks.

There’s still time to decide

At present it is still somewhat unclear how you can replace InfoPath or if you even need to replace it. Microsoft have announced some valuable replacement options but none of them can really replace InfoPath just yet. Microsoft have promised to announce more news about this topic in Q1 2015.

There are some good third party solutions out there and some build-in solutions that are almost ready too. If your form solution is likely to be there for a long time and need frequent updates then you should choose a new track. However, if the solution is small or very clear then InfoPath is still the right option for you.