DEATH TO INFOPATH!

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There are few technologies that I truly hate and InfoPath is right up there.  The problem isn’t necessarily InfoPath itself (okay, yes, I do hate it and it sucks hard), but the misconceptions from many former and current customers and business users about the utility and suitability of InfoPath cause it to be deployed in a variety of situations where it has no business being in a web-based enterprise architecture.

It’s a technology that has been oversold and over-promised but always under-delivers and “enterprise architects” love the stuffin’s out of it for some reason without a real grasp on why it’s such a lame, terrible technology.

Now it seems that it’s reached the end of the line:

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.

Microsoft makes many great things like .NET and Visual Studio and some total duds like InfoPath (a solution looking for a problem).

This is my favorite part of the blog post:

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.

Hey Microsoft, here’s a tip for you: HTML!  What took you so long?  I mean, holy smokes, why did you even waste the money to conceive of InfoPath Forms Services to convert InfoPath forms into HTML in the first place? Why did you even bother with forcing developers to build forms in some terrible designer with a terrible programming experience only to convert those forms right back into HTML so that people could fill it out?

Any idiot could have seen the utter uselessness and un-ceremonial end of InfoPath years ago.

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