J asked me to create a Change Management site last week. He’d been using a Word document template to gather information about change requests and record signatures. Today I suggested we convert his Word document into an Infopath form so that end users could fill out everything via their browser. He agreed, so I got…

J asked me to create a Change Management site last week. He’d been using a Word document template to gather information about change requests and record signatures.

Today I suggested we convert his Word document into an Infopath form so that end users could fill out everything via their browser. He agreed, so I got to work.

I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The Word document was fairly ugly — lots of garish colors and huge groups of picklists. I’ve changed that to a more restrained look, and used Radio buttons and drop down menus to keep the form from looking too busy.

I used repeating sections to handle those cases where more than one name needed to be entered. On the current form, he just had a bunch of blank lines.

I also got to use Submit Options for the first time. These let you automatically generate a unique filename for the document instead of relying on the user to type something in themselves.

One thing that bothers me is that we don’t have a standard look and feel to any of our forms. Not even a common color scheme. I’ve been using the MS standard shades of blue. On this form I also added a nice faded UHS logo to the top. It’s an attractive, understated logo, that I think I’ll be using in future forms.