InfoPath 2010 Public Beta is Here!

The InfoPath team is excited to announce the release of the Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 public betas! For the 1st time members of the public can download InfoPath 2010. Download it now from www.microsoft.com/2010!

Here are just some of the highlights in this new release. (For more details, see our earlier What's New in InfoPath 2010 post).

Quick and Easy Form Design

• Designing good looking forms has been made easier with our new page layout templates, layout tables, and themes.
• With our new out-of-the-box rules and improved rules management UI, you can easily add rules to validate data, format your form, or perform other actions with just a couple of clicks, and without any code. 
• Our new “quick” publish functionality allows you to publish forms in a single click (no more clicking through the Publishing Wizard every time you want to make an update to your forms!)
• New Controls include the picture button, signature line control and person/group picker which is now available out-of-the-box in the controls gallery.

SharePoint Integration
Over the past 3 years of product development, we’ve made huge investments in integration with the SharePoint platform to make it much easier to build rich forms-based applications on top of SharePoint Server 2010.

• Using InfoPath, you can now extend and enhance the forms used for creating, editing and viewing items in a SharePoint list.
• With the new InfoPath Form Web Part, you can host your forms on portal pages without writing a single line of code. 
• With SharePoint sandboxed solutions, forms with code can be published directly to SharePoint libraries without requiring administratror approval.
• Richer browser forms:Bulleted, numbered, and plain lists, multiple selection list boxes, Combo boxes, Choice group and sections, and Filtering functionality are now supported in browser forms.
• InfoPath Forms Services Administration and Management: We have invested in many improvements to make it easier to manage InfoPath Forms Services as a component of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. These include Powershell commandlets to automate tasks and SharePoint Maintenance Manager Rules to monitor the health of your server.

Introduced since the technical preview, InfoPath now supports connecting to REST Web Services.

Go download the beta now and send us your feedback using Send-a-Smile.

Enjoy!

The InfoPath Team

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2009
  " ... you can now extend and enhance the forms used for creating, editing and viewing items ..." I'm assuming this can be done in SharePoint Foundation lists as well (does not require Forms Services and Enterprise license). Am I correct? Regards, Frode

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2009
  Changes look great, looking forward to using it.  One big limitation was only supporting XPath 1.0, does IP2010 allow using XPath 2.0?

• Anonymous
  December 07, 2009
  In response to the comment from FrodeS, SharePoint list form customization is not available with SharePoint Foundation. With a standard license, users will be able to customize SharePoint Workflow forms only. With an Enterprise license, they will also be able to customize SharePoint List Forms.

• Anonymous
  December 30, 2009
  I've been trying to get Sharepoint 2010 and Infopath 2010 to where I can send the link for the Browser-enabled Form, and someone can fill out the data and click the SUBMIT button and send an email to an email address. My issue is that I keep getting an error, but it's not specifying what the error is! I can easily submit and it shows up in the document library InfoPath Forms that I've created on the Sharepoint 2010, I just can't get the submit to send to an email. Any thoughts?