InfoPath is being retired.
That’s the word from the Microsoft blog on the future of forms in Office 365 and SharePoint. No future versions of InfoPath will be shipped, the company stated.
From the blog:
Industry trends and feedback from our customers and partners make it clear that today’s businesses demand an intelligent, integrated forms experience that spans devices. We are looking to make investments that allow you to easily design, deploy, and use intelligent, integrated forms across Office clients, servers, and services—forms that everyone can use on their PC, tablet, or phone. Our goal is to deliver tools that are flexible and agile, so you can quickly connect to your data and processes in new and exciting ways.
So how are we evolving our forms technology? In an effort to streamline our investments and deliver a more integrated Office forms user experience, we’re retiring InfoPath and investing in new forms technology across SharePoint, Access, and Word. This means that InfoPath 2013 is the last release of the desktop client, and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is the last release of InfoPath Forms Services. The InfoPath Forms Services technology within Office 365 will be maintained and it will function until further notice.
The blog goes on to state that Microsoft will be providing migration guidance to current InfoPath customers, but added that until that arrives, customers can continue to use InfoPath tools. Also, support for the desktop client and InfoPath Forms Services for SharePoint Server will continue through 2023.
You can read the complete blog post here.
Microsoft is offering a sneak peak at the forms road map, from the upcoming SPC 14, here: “SharePoint Forms Roadmap.”
A more detailed look at the forms situation will be available at SPTechCon San Francisco.
