Form execution with only Windows SharePoint Services 3.0?
For the most part, my organization is happy with WSS 3.0 (no upgrade to MOSS), with one exception, there is really one form that we would like to pose somehow. This is quite a large form (basically changes requests for IT services, on paper easily 2 full 8.5 x 11 pages). We thought of custom ASP.NET coding as a standalone standalone page, or perhaps as a web part. What have other people done? MOSS and Infopath are not really an option as they are too expensive for us these days. Thanks in advance!
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If you need to develop it yourself, do it right in asp.net. There is no point in doing this in sharepoint. The learning curve is steep. The development infrastructure is heavy for one solution.
An IT service change request is part of the workflow most of the time. I believe the best workflow tools are bug trackers. They use a government base workflow. Which is better, in most cases, the real world. So, if you have such a tool and you should have. Verify that this parameter is used to manage change requests.
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You can accomplish most of this with Infowise Smart List Pro. It is designed to be a simple solution to 80% of general shape needs. it does this with big enhancements to SharePoint List like: field resolution, tabbed view, view resolution, defaults, rules, etc. The lattice is that Smart List Pro doesn't require MOSS or SharePoint Server. it can only work on WSS or SharePoint Foundations. It works great on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2010.
Here is the link: http://www.infowisesolutions.com/product.aspx?id=SmartListPro
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You might want to simplify the change request form. 2 pages of material is quite a lot of information to fill out a change request.
I use standard hit lists to collect change requests and find myself lucky to have people fill in the first 4-5 fields.
The dataview web part can be used to add data instead of the standard new item form.
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The poll list is a nice simple alternative to forms and can be used without any coding. Enter "questions", i.e. enter input fields, then add email alert for inserts. The downside is that you have no control over the layout of the form, it is strictly one line for each input field. This makes it perhaps not a good candidate for your larger forms. But it's so easy to use that you should still have a look at it.
If you decide to develop yourself, write a web part and add it to your WSS page. (Simplest deployment: inherit from ASP.Net WebPart class, put in GAC, create .webpart file in SharePoint Webapp wapcatalog folder). Again, the person who wrote that the learning curve in SharePoint is too steep, my guess is that if you use WSS for your internal web applications, you will find more customization needs for SharePoint going forward. Learning how to do this is a good investment.
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The best way I would say is to create a web user control and add it to a web part (container web part) - custom controls can be added to 12 hive and selected from there. I tried this and its a very simple way to evolve considering the page has a lot of content. The problem with Webpart and standard asp page development is that there is no design.
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