Going Paperless

I’ve been giving a lot of thought and working on concepts related to setting up a “paperless office.” After doing some cursory checking, I found that while doable in most cases it is a costly endeavor. The operative words are “most-cases.”

After looking around, I rediscovered a product that I was initially excited about when it was first released, but then let go of the idea due to lack of market penetration. That product is called Microsoft InfoPath which is a part of the MS Office product line. After a little and then a lot of playing around, I found it to be an amazingly powerful tool that was more than capable of helping an organization the (often illusive) goal of the paperless office.

Now that’s cool
Telling you what is exciting about InfoPath is pretty easy. Here are just a few I found after a few hours of time well spent;

1. Custom form creation. I loved that I could use the standard “Table Drawing” tools and setup forms just like I normally do in word. I didn’t have to change my paradigm about how I develop forms.

2. Easy form controls. InfoPath offers easy to access drag and drop tools. You can insert text boxes, radio buttons and much more and not miss a beat. The form control tools have a great deal of flexibility.

3. Data-centric. You can name the form controls that you drop in (e.g. firstName, lastName, address, etc... This comes in handy for working with XML and/or database schemas.

4. You can set and limit data types. What that means is that you can setup a field to only accept a number, pattern or even number of characters allowed.

5. Data sources and views. You can easily setup data sources and related views of the information.

6. Accessibility to Web services

7. Built-in spellchecking. This might not seem like a big deal on first glance, but I cannot tell you how many times that I have either read or myself was not sure of if a work is correctly spelled. InfoPath places the traditional Microsoft red squiggle underneath misspelled words. That’s just plain helpful.

I should also let you know that there is also a fairly significant InfoPath develop community and related forums. What that means that there is a lot of help for people interested in taking hold of their office and going paperless. Also as a part of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 there is an allegedly more robust version of InfoPath on the launce page.

Conclusion
At 199.00 for a full version, InfoPath is a no-brainer. There is a strong upside in how employees and interact with, visualize and share information. Employees can be empowered to create new and interesting solutions for the business and related customers.

When thinking of why you would even go paperless in the first place, here’s a simple question. How much does your office spend on copy paper per year? What would you do if you could cut that anywhere from half to two-thirds? What would that do for your bottom line and company? Think about it and go paperless.

Jaye Morris, Technologist