Hi Guys sorry for such a general question. I work for a small team in for one of the biggest multi-national companies in the world. We have recently adopted MOSS 2007 as our portal technology. I was asked by manager to investigate InfoPath web based forms and their viability for my team. 2 problems: The company won't pay for the MS Enterprise CAL licence so I can't switch on the InfoPath Forms Services - thus no web based forms. The company won't pay for the InfoPath enterprise licence to roll out to my users - so no InfoPath forms full stop. Are there alternative methods I can use, alternative form softwares that can be run/ accessed from sharepoint?

How will these forms be used? You are saying you DON'T want web based forms at all? Even highly styled forms created using a tool like jQuery? What is your ideal end result from a business perspective? The SharePoint Hillbilly Fewer Big Words... More Pretty Pictures... http://www.SharePointHillbilly.com

How will these forms be used? You are saying you DON'T want web based forms at all? Even highly styled forms created using a tool like jQuery? What is your ideal end result from a business perspective? The SharePoint Hillbilly Fewer Big Words... More Pretty Pictures... http://www.SharePointHillbilly.com Hi Sorry, should of given more details. Web based forms would be the ultimate goal for me. I want my users (who are based around the world) to be able to access them without having to install proprietary software on their machines. The main criteria is that the forms can be stored and accessed from MOSS 2007. Sorry I can't be more specific we have over 40 different types of form so far.

For basic style forms you can just create a custom list. For each field you want someone to fill out on a form just add a new column. Users can then add items to the list filling in the values you specified. By default the forms will be pretty basic, there won't be much logic avaulable by default, you can make fields mandatory, set default values, and that's about it. But by using the different column types cleverly you can capture information well. And you can put a SharePoint Designer workflow on the list to add some extra functionality (notifications, approvals etc). If you have some development experience (in particular XSLT) you can customise the NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx to add more functionality (google for details on doing this before trying, there's a few tricks to getting it right).

We routinely use jQuery to give users world class highly customized web forms for entering data in SharePoint, this gives you total control of look and feel, usability, and data validation. I highly recommend using SimpleModal (http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/) for doing pop up or wizard forms and SPServices (http://spservices.codeplex.com) for creating/editing List data... SPServices even gives you the ability to join list data together seamlessly to the user. And yes.. they are both free. Good luck! MarkThe SharePoint Hillbilly Fewer Big Words... More Pretty Pictures... http://www.SharePointHillbilly.com

Why don't you just develop ASP .Net forms? Use the SP Object Model in your code. Package as a feature if you like, and deploy as a wsp.