Well, it’s official.  Microsoft have just announced the retirement of InfoPath and that they have been working on a new forms technology, of which a sneak peak will be given to the public at the SharePoint Conference in March.

For those in the know, or developing with InfoPath on a regular basis this was not really a surprise.  Ever since the 2007 release of InfoPath, fewer and fewer investments had been made in the product, bucking the trend of other Microsoft technologies, causing people to speculate that Microsoft may move in a different direction for the enterprise forms technology.

This different direction is to add new forms capabilities into SharePoint, Word and Access.

So where to next then?

The official position of Microsoft is to keep creating InfoPath forms because the product is still supported, and a migration plan will be announced.

In my opinion this makes sense for companies using InfoPath for simple forms and ones that are not heavily used in workflows.

For companies that have more advanced form requirements, such as those used heavily in workflows, you may want to consider a technology such as K2 Forms or Nintex Forms.