Complexity aside, analysts see tremendous potential for InfoPath among enterprises looking to use XML as a way of wringing more use out of their data. The purpose of InfoPath, and the Office 11 suite as a whole, is "to create documents that are intrinsically structured but [to hide] the complexity of that structure as much as possible," said Jupiter Research analyst David Schatsky. "If you look at Office over the years, there have been a lot of half measures for gathering structured data," Schatsky said. "None of them have been robust enough a solution for enterprises, which would give up on, say, Word and develop their own solutions for gathering structured data from end users" -- typically as Web-based forms. Web-based forms and many other in-house data-collection tools typically require software on a server to interact with a client. Microsoft hopes to use InfoPath as a means of bringing much of the power back to the desktop, where many Office documents are generated and stored. InfoPath "tends to elevate the value of data (that) end users create and...store on their desktops by making the structure more implicit and easier to use with other applications," Schatsky said. Microsoft is also betting that InfoPath could emerge as a front-end to existing customer relationship management programs (CRM) and enterprise resource planning applications (ERP), such as those from Siebel Systems or SAP. In fact, Forrester Research gave these types of applications a failing grade, because of employee resistance to many CRM and ERP front-end clients. "Those real large companies have a large problem with employee productivity," Schadler said. "They load Siebel, and the employees hate it and go out of their way not to use it. We think InfoPath is an alternative client for services that might already be available in Siebel." While enterprises might initially go through a difficult process deciding how best to use InfoPath and how to set up the proper policies and infrastructure, employees would be offered the familiarity of an Office product interface. Schadler sees this as an enormous opportunity for Office sales. "Microsoft would like nothing more than to make Office the front-end to these other (back-end) applications," Schadler said. Another potential use involves distributing commonly used administrative forms. "It's significant for enterprise customers," said Paul DeGroot, an analyst with market researcher Directions of Microsoft. "Forms are a staple of many enterprises, and I could see InfoPath even encouraging them to convert a lot of their documentation--particularly common memos, such as HR requests, purchasing requests, common announcements and bulletins--into a forms front-end; the argument being that such data loses its randomness and becomes manageable, retrievable, and so on." Still, while supporting XML as an industry standard, Microsoft is taking its own approach to creating forms, choosing not to support the XForms standard adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium. "It's obviously a big divergence from XForms," Schadler said. "That's one area where they're out of sync with the standards bodies." Still, "it's not surprising Microsoft would not go with the industry standard version, because they would want InfoPath to have some stickiness to customers." A Microsoft representative declined to comment on the company's position about XForms or InfoPath ahead of the Office 2003 Beta 2 launch. Next week's official Office 2003 Beta 2 launch will give as many as a half million testers and businesses their first real look at InfoPath. Microsoft distributed the product, then codenamed XDocs, to a small number of testers during the Beta 1 process, which began in October.
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