Part 1 of the series is here.

Part 2 of the series is here.

In past posts, I've outlined some of the differences between the Groove Forms tool and the Groove InfoPath Forms tool. Armed with that background, we can begin to see the criteria to use when deciding which tool to use for a given application.

Some reasons you may want to choose Groove InfoPath Forms:

  • You already have an existing InfoPath Solution that meets Groove requirements (enumerated here) or that can easily be modified to meet Groove Requirements.
  • You require forms that generate XML documents that conform to a prescribed XML schema. In this case, you will need some custom code (using Web Services) in order to extract the XML documents when you're ready to archive the data, since there is no out-of-the-box functionality for that in the InfoPath tool. (The Groove Forms tools can both save data as XML, and can export data to Excel, but the InfoPath tool only exports promoted fields. In order to extract the actual XML documents from the InfoPath Forms tool, you'll need to write an application that uses Groove Web Services APIs.)
  • You want to develop a form template that can also be used with InfoPath outside of Groove.
  • You want to extract and archive Groove forms data on a SharePoint site and have it be accessible with InfoPath. Again, this requires Web Services code.
  • You want to use some form features that are available in InfoPath, i.e., repeating sections, that are not easy to reproduce in a Groove Forms design.

Some reasons you may want to choose Groove Forms:

  • You require a multi-form solution with hierarchical form relationships.
  • Your form requires lookups into other forms.
  • You want to use the integrated Groove object model, i.e., implementing simple workflow, using lookups in script code, sending IMs, etc.
  • You cannot guaranty that all users will have InfoPath 2007.

In general, I think about the InfoPath tool as being useful for simple data collection, especially when you want to have XML documents to archive, and Forms as being useful for more complex scenarios, for example, hierarchical form relationships.

Hopefully, this series has helped outline some of the tradeoffs in using the different Groove forms tools. Next, I'm going to do a series that will explore the Groove InfoPath Forms tool in more detail.