Last night’s meeting of the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group was one of the best we’ve had for a while. Although we still aren’t getting the numbers we’d like (there were seven of us this time around), we got a great presentation from relative-newcomer Nathan on InfoPath.

Nathan ran through the basics of InfoPath and knocked up a demo form that submitted its data at first by writing to an Access database and then later by emailing an xml file to a preconfigured address. We discussed the various uses that InfoPath might play in an organization, particularly around the offline submission of forms which could be queued in your Outlook outbox until you reconnected.

Here at work we’ve been using simple SharePoint forms coupled with Nintex Workflow to do some of our form-submissions stuff, but I can see a future for InfoPath for us. The only obstacle might be licensing, given that the client application is only available in the Pro SKU of Office 2007 (as far as I know), or if you want to use the server component to render your forms in the browser there’s another cost there. Still, you never know!

We’re taking January off as is our custom, but we’ll be back on the second Tuesday of February 2009 with an as-yet-undisclosed presentation from Anton, which I’m sure will rock the house. If you’re one of the 20-or-so people that are on the mailing list but don’t show, please consider coming along! The more the merrier!