One for Robert Scoble and the rest of the Microsofties...
I'm installing office 2003 Professional onto my PC - mostly to get the shiny new version of outlook but also to get a copy of Infopath to play with.
Except that I won't - because for reasons that are utterly beyond me its not included in this version of office (and no, I didn't get to choose).
I am just completing compilation of a directory from data submitted via excel spreadsheets - its a mess, the supplied data is wildly inconsistent - partly because the spreadsheet places no constraints on the data input and partly because there needs to be a fairly large amount of flexibility in the content entered and this has left the usage of the various columns somewhat open to interpretation.
Next year (this year even) is going to be different - I'm going to have significant influence over how the requests are submitted so what would I like? I would like to have the stuff input as schema validated XML - so that I don't have to worry about importing it at all if one works backwards, this means that I need to provide the contributors with a form they can fill in that stores its data as XML... use the tools in office? Not a chance - even if infopath were included in every single version of office 2003 its still singularly unlikely that even half of the contributors would have copy. What do I need? An infopath form filler. Or equivalent... fortunately Adobe appear to have grasped this need. Unfortunately it seems to me that they want to make it almost as hard.
Oh yes, in theory a web page would do this very nicely. But only in theory - email I can assume (and the ability to receive a CD with software on through the post) but access to the web as reasonable speeds? Nah...
So, to go with all this nice XML stuff we need an XML form filler and it needs to be free.
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