is an application used to develop
XML based user forms, first released as part of the
Microsoft Office 2003 suite of programs in late
2003 . The main feature of InfoPath is its ability to author and view XML documents with support for custom-defined XML schemas. It can connect to external systems using
XML Web Services through
MSXML and the
SOAP Toolkit, and back-end and middle-tier systems can be configured to communicate by using Web services standards such as SOAP,
UDDI , and
WSDL . Additionally, since InfoPath documents are XML based, it is possible to use data from external database sources to bind to form controls instead of InfoPath itself.
