STOP USING INFOPATH
InfoPath is a really, really old technology. Why are a lot of companies still using it? I’ve teamed up with Rob Bogue and Mark Rackley, for this informal “Stop using InfoPath” campaign.
Microsoft killed InfoPath, wow, it’s been about 7 years ago now? A lot of companies are still crunching along with thousands of InfoPath forms, just waiting… for… what exactly?
When this first happened, at the time there wasn’t a Microsoft replacement. So, people kept asking, “What do we do? What product do we move to?”
About three or four years ago, on my weekly SharePoint Power Hour YouTube show, I started doing on-the-fly demonstrations of various forms products to try out. Now, with things in technology changing so fast, most of these are probably drastically different by now, but here is my playlist of 8 videos, of forms products besides InfoPath. This was all done before PowerApps existed.
Watch the Playlist, Forms Product comparisons (old): 
As far as Microsoft products go, there is no official upgrade path from InfoPath to anything else. I think there are a couple of 3rd party vendors working on products to help convert, but I haven’t tried any of them yet.
Microsoft has create a modernization scanner that you can use, to search for those old products in your environment:
🔍 SharePoint Modernization Scanner
PowerApps is the next evolution of the direction of forms products (as of today) as far as Microsoft is concerned. SharePoint Designer workflows are going away, too, and Microsoft Flow is the replacement. No, there’s no official migration path for that one, either. You need to just re-create everything from scratch. Another thing that I get a lot of questions about is “Microsoft Forms”. This is nothing like InfoPath, nothing like PowerApps. This is more like just a very simple survey tool. You can only do ONE-WAY FORMS. Only submit forms, there is no editing an existing Microsoft Form. When the data gets submitted, it’s up to you to do what you’d like with it, using Flow. You can do things like add the data to a SharePoint list and/or send it in an email, add it to a database, whatever you’d like. It’s just one way, though.
Back to PowerApps. I’ve got plenty of other blog posts and videos about PowerApps, but basically you can customize forms, and do some simple things, and then the logic can get pretty complex. It’s not programming, it’s more like writing Excel formulas. It’s a very powerful tool, it just has quite a learning curve.
IF you’re still using InfoPath, I’ve created a survey for you to fill out:
TAKE THE STUCK ON INFOPATH SURVEY
Don’t just take my word for it, Mark and Rob wrote these, much more eloquent and descriptive blog posts:
Mark Rackley – Seriously, It’s Time, Just Say “No” to InfoPath
Rob Bogue – Using InfoPath Today (Not Just Say “No”)
Want to know more about PowerApps?
Take my free Power Apps Basics course
Read my blog posts about Power Apps
See my Power Hours about Power Apps – go to this page and scroll down for a list
And of course, go to https://www.powerapps.com for more resource links, community forums, and a ton more videos and info.
Pingback: InfoPath Q&A on Power Hour | @WonderLaura
Pingback: Panel: InfoPath is a Dead End | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath Radio Button Bold Selection | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath–”Save and New” button | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath– Getting the “Signature” | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath: Pre-populate the People Picker | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath: Create Common Multiple Choice Selections | @WonderLaura
Pingback: User Information within InfoPath Forms | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath “Save Draft” Form Functionality – A Better Way | @WonderLaura
Pingback: Video Demos of My InfoPath Approval Process and Workflow | @WonderLaura
Pingback: Web Part: Manager Sees Subordinates Tasks | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath: Using the ID field as the Form Filename | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath – Query Specific SharePoint List Data | @WonderLaura
Pingback: Link to a Specific InfoPath View | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath– Formulate Email Link to Browser Form | @WonderLaura
Pingback: InfoPath Button: Create a New Site | @WonderLaura
I started developing in SharePoint beginning of 2014. Shortly after I started, Microsoft announced InfoPath would be sunset. “OK,” I thought “we should do something else then. So I just wrote Site Pages from scratch with a bootstrap front ends, using Ajax calls to do crud operations. Sometimes I’d use jQuery and sometimes I did full single page applications with AngularJS. My supervisor at the time, though, decided at one point to continue to roll out new applications using InfoPath. I though it was a bad idea, but she felt they would be more easily maintainable than the thousands of lines of code I was writing. My contract ended this year (2019) and, as far as I know, they still have lots of InfoPath-based applications out there and I assume eventually they’ll have to do a big project to migrate them to something else. I would not be surprised to learn they’re rolling out new InfoPath applications to this day because when I left, they still didn’t have the licenses for PowerApps. It was an Office 365 government tenant, so I’m not sure if that makes a difference.
InfoPath Form Document Library – Multi-line field truncating to 255 characters – how to get the full data out of the Form and present it to the business when SharePoint won’t expose the data?
What about on premise versions of SharePoint. I understand that SharePoint 2019 does support powerapps and flow using connectors. But will the experience be the same as office365? How about a third party products like Nintex with on premises? Microsoft somehow needs a strategy to push things to SharePoint onpremises frequently as they are doing with office 365. Still there are lot of customers who are using SharePoint onpremises due to some compliance reasons.
Yes, move to a 3rd party solution like Infowise or Nintex with on-premises.
I get it – InfoPath is old and on its way out. But I’m not a developer. And it is the best OOB solution (at least, that I know of) for custom forms that allow hide/display, conditional formatting, rules, etc. And to be honest, it is a rockstar for non-developers like me.
I support a large team with various needs for request forms. And InfoPath solves for almost all of these needs. Unfortunately, because we are such a large company, our security office and IT leadership have not approved PowerApps OR Flow for our use – yet. So we are stuck trying to appease a portion of our business partners with the simple list forms available on SharePoint Online, while warning others that InfoPath won’t be supported much longer so they will have to be ready for a hard stop – soon. So it’s not like I am hanging on to InfoPath (and SPD) because I’m stuck in a rut – I just really don’t have any other choice to meet the needs of my partners at this point.
It depends on what version of SharePoint you’re on. If you’re in Office 365, I recommend moving away from InfoPath ASAP. Sucks that you have politics to deal with, but those leaders need to realize what’s happening.
The college I work for still uses SP 2013 on premise and I don’t think they plan on upgrading anytime soon. I mentioned PowerApps to our Network Dept. and they just said they haven’t explored it and don’t they will. They’re still comfortable using InfoPath, and since I am not developer, just like previous user, I am also very dependable on InfoPath. Although is a pain getting workflows and user profiles service to work.
Hi Jon
Use the user Information List instead of the the old User Profile service.
UPS does still work on premises, just a few more steps with claims involved. Also, PowerApps isn’t on premises at all. I recommend looking into Infowise Ultimate Forms. InfoPath is going away, there’s no getting around it.
Pingback: SharePoint 2010 – Dynamic Calculations in a List Form | @WonderLaura
Pingback: SharePoint 2010 InfoPath List Form – A Fix | @WonderLaura
Pingback: List Form Fields–Show/Hide For Certain People: Part 1 | @WonderLaura
Infopath is supported when used with SharePoint 2019 so it will be supported until at least until EOL for SP 2019.
It’s supported until 2026. Most browsers hate it, though. 😉 See the bottom of the post here. The support cycle matches SP 2016, not SP 2019. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2016/01/20/sharepoint-server-2016-and-project-server-2016-release-candidate-available/
It’s also listed here in the official documentation, in the section called “InfoPath Services” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/what-s-new/what-s-deprecated-or-removed-from-sharepoint-server-2019
Hi, We’re hoping to move away from InfoPath asap but I’m struggling to find any detail online that describes how Powerapps replicates all the great functions of InfoPath e.g. custom forms that allow hide/display, conditional formatting, rules, formulas etc and keep getting conflicting advise from different users. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Hi, I teach all of that in my Power Apps online course: https://www.iwmentor.com/courses/powerapps-training
One click in infopath has turned into a week long journey for me to figure out how to change the display of a drop down list to check boxes. It’s ridiculous that you can’t do this out of the box in PowerApps. And I still have not figured out how to do it with a customized list form.
Yes there are things like that that are a pain in Power Apps. You’d want to use a combo box that allows multiple select, if you want people to have a list of choices that they’re selecting multiple of. A combo box is never going to look like check boxes. You could create a whole custom thing in order to achieve that, but just getting users to click multiple items without having to see check boxes next to them would be easier.