External Data & InfoPath: Server Upgrade and Migration Tool
Getting external data into an InfoPath form is extremely easy and creating rich electronic forms is easy as well, so lots of power users and developers are using InfoPath to capture structured data. Publishing those forms is also very easy: in the InfoPath client, just click the Publish menu item and go through the wizard. Et voila, the form is ready to be filled out in a SharePoint document library by the end users. The fun starts when those power users or developers are not allowed to deploy directly to the production SharePoint servers: probably the locations of the external data is different on your development/test server than on the production machine (especially if you automatically submit data). In InfoPath 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) this can be solved by using Universal Data Connection (UDC) files. The InfoPath knows where to find the UDC file (relatively to the location of the form) and the UDC file tells InfoPath where to data is located. So the location of the data is not stored anymore in InfoPath, but it's stored in the UDC file. The result: you can change the location without having to change the InfoPath form.
This is all great if the people who create the InfoPath forms are making use of UDC files, if not ... you can make use of a new Microsoft tool: the Server Upgrade and Migration Tool for Microsoft Office InfoPath. There are some other reasons why you could make use of this tool: backup/restore, upgrade from WSSv2, ...
The Server Upgrade and Migration tool allows a SharePoint farm administrator to change hard-coded URLs in InfoPath form templates, UDC files, and content types to ensure that the form templates continue to work correctly in the following circumstances:
- When performing a gradual upgrade from Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or from Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
- When migrating InfoPath forms and form templates from one Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Web site collection to another.
- Data connections to the local server contained in the InfoPath form template
The tool can also be used on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 server after content is migrated from one location to another to fix up URLs that may be broken by the move. Similarly, the tool can be used to fix up URLs when a backup set is restored to a new server or when an existing content database is attached to a new server. When the tool is run on a Version 3.0 Web application or Web site collection, the following are also updated:
- Data connections to the local server contained in data connection files in a data connection library
- URL to a form template contained within a content type