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• February 24, 2004 •

Microsoft Offers Preview of Updated InfoPath 2003

InfoPath 2003 Microsoft today unveiled a special preview of updates that will be added to Microsoft® Office InfoPath™ 2003, the information-gathering and management program, as part of the Office 2003 service pack scheduled for release in June. In addition, the service pack also will contain feature enhancements that organizations can choose to deploy to aid developers and end users in capitalizing on the InfoPath platform. By downloading the InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview, form designers can begin incorporating the forthcoming enhancements into their InfoPath 2003 solutions, enabling them to make updated solutions available when the Microsoft Office System service pack is released.

The Preview is 100% compatible with existing InfoPath 2003 solutions. When developing new solutions with the Preview, you will have a choice to create forms fully compatible with InfoPath 2003 or forms that take advantage of the new feature enhancements, which include:

  • More control choices, including Master/Detail, File Attachment, Recursive Section, and Choice, as well as custom-authored controls.
  • Better schema support, including built-in support for schema changes.
  • Printing improvements, including page breaks, margins and print settings.
  • Improved e-mail deployment of sandboxed solutions and auto-updating of trusted solutions.
  • Better management and categorization of solutions.
  • Tablet PC support improvements.
  • Increased support for rules and roles for declarative business logic.
  • Enhanced XPath expression support, including calculations without writing script.
  • Additional data adaptors for email and SharePoint Products and Technologies lists.
  • Better support for custom migration plug-ins.
  • Enhanced Object Model (OM), including OnSave event, offline state, submit, and digital signatures.
  • Improved support for secondary data sources.
  • Additional support for business logic written in managed code (requires a separate download).
  • Enhanced OM for external automation and windowless mode for application-level calls.
  • Better support for ADO datasets and diffgrams to round-trip data changes.
  • Additional support for complex scripts, such as right-to-left and South Asian languages.
  • Enhanced support for digital signatures, including partial signatures, non-repudiation, co-signing, and counter-signing.
  • Improved stability and performance, including auto-save and data recovery.

Notes:

  • This preview software is intended for evaluation purposes only.
  • There is no product support for this Preview. Peer to peer support is available on the microsoft.public.infopath newsgroup. Information about accessing the Microsoft newsgroups and a web based newsreader is available on the Microsoft Product Support Newsgroups site.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 (SP2 / SP3), Windows Server 2003, Windows XP

To author business logic using C# or Visual Basic .NET, additional software is required:

  • Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2003 (Enterprise Architect, Enterprise Developer, Professional, or Academic, with Visual C# .NET or Visual Basic .NET)
  • InfoPath™ 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET

Download:

You can download a U.S. English version of the InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview free from the Microsoft Web site [135 MB].

Developers who are interested in creating form templates in InfoPath 2003 using Visual Studio .NET 2003 should also download the Visual Studio toolkit for InfoPath from the Microsoft Download site [3.28 MB]

Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 is available as part of Microsoft Office Professional 2003 Enterprise Edition, with stand-alone versions available through Microsoft's volume licensing channels as well as at retail outlets for an estimated retail price of $199 (U.S.; retail prices may vary). Additional information about InfoPath and the 2003 Office editions is available at the Microsoft Office Web site.

Microsoft Office System Service Pack 1 will be distributed to U.S. and international customers in late June.

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Last Updated: February 24, 2004