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Plan form template design infrastructure requirements (Office SharePoint Server)

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Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

  • Server requirements

  • Network requirements

  • Security requirements

Before you begin deploying form templates in an InfoPath Forms Services production environment, it is important that you carefully consider the server, security, and network requirements to support your deployment. InfoPath Forms Services can support many thousands of form templates of varying degrees of complexity, and it provides support for user-deployed form templates. As with any enterprise system, it is crucial to design your infrastructure to support the intended level of usage and to establish a clear strategy for scaling the system to meet increased capacity requirements.

Note

Once you have established the expected usage and size of your deployment, you should always deploy to a staging system before you deploy to a production environment. This allows you to establish performance and capacity baselines and to ensure that your design functions as expected.

The factors you need to consider include:

  • Expected number of users

  • Expected number of form templates

  • Expected life cycle of form templates (the length of time that a form template will be used before being retired or upgraded)

  • Complexity of form templates (for example, how many form templates will use data connections or complex code, or instantiate a workflow)

  • Security considerations

You should read the following Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 planning articles before you begin planning your InfoPath Forms Services infrastructure:

Server requirements

Because InfoPath Forms Services is only one component of Office SharePoint Server 2007, you need to ensure that your overall Office SharePoint Server 2007 planning process takes into account the particular requirements of InfoPath Forms Services. You may need to increase server capacity to accommodate InfoPath Forms Services users and form templates, particularly if you plan to deploy anonymous form templates to the Internet or plan to deploy complex form templates that require considerable memory and processor time.

For more information on infrastructure and capacity planning for Office SharePoint Server 2007, see the Office SharePoint Server 2007 planning articles Book Excerpt: Design server farms and topologies (Office SharePoint Server) and Plan for performance and capacity (Office SharePoint Server).

Network requirements

In general, you should follow common networking best practices for enterprise systems, such as:

  • Use a firewall between tiers, and between front-end Web servers and the Internet.

  • Use a high-speed network backbone for intra-server communications.

  • Monitor the network environment for peak bandwidth usage and denial-of-service attacks.

  • Perform regular network security audits.

For more information on network requirements, see the Office SharePoint Server 2007 planning article Book Excerpt: Design server farms and topologies (Office SharePoint Server).

Security requirements

InfoPath Forms Services security takes advantage of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 security framework, but InfoPath Forms Services has its own security considerations apart from Office SharePoint Server 2007 security, which include the following:

  • Administrator-approved form templates may have privileges on corporate systems, including cross-domain access rights, and may contain code that runs under an administrator account. For this reason, it is important that all administrator-approved form templates be carefully reviewed prior to deployment by an administrator who is familiar with InfoPath Forms Services security.

  • An administrator may grant certain farm-level privileges, such as allowing user form templates to use data connections that access data across domains. These settings should be carefully considered before changing the defaults, as they may have a broad impact on security across the entire farm.

  • If you have enabled the Web service proxy, it should run under a unique application pool account. You should disable the Web service proxy if it is not used.

For more information on security requirements, see the Office SharePoint Server 2007 planning article Plan for and design security (Office SharePoint Server).

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See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Office SharePoint Server 2007.

See Also

Concepts

Determine the impact of anonymously accessible form templates (Office SharePoint Server)