How Microsoft InfoPath Is Helping Cancer Researchers Go Paperless
Cancer research center Van Andel Institute is using Microsoft's InfoPath electronic form software to quickly and easily automate a variety of manual business processes. Is InfoPath right for your organization?
Now students can attach files to their applications and submit the whole package electronically. Their applications go into a private, secured SharePoint library. Instead of having to re-key all that information into the registrar's system, an administrative assistant just has to create an export file through a series of clicks that gets the student's application out of the SharePoint library and into Van Andel's Education Edge administrative system.
The whole process on the administrative assistant's end takes about five minutes, says Campbell.
InfoPath makes sense for smaller organizations that are heavy Microsoft users, like the 250+ employee Van Andel Institute.
Bryon Campbell, CIO of Van Andel Institute, says he opted to use the InfoPath software bundled with his Microsoft Office suite instead of a similar electronic form solution from Adobe because it "fit right with our strategy for our infrastructure, which is Microsoft-based, and because it tightly integrated with SharePoint." The Institute currently runs 100 SharePoint sites.
Craig Le Clair, a senior analyst with Forrester Research who covers the market for electronic form software, agrees that InfoPath is good platform for Microsoft-oriented shops to investigate. He says it's inexpensive for them and integrates well with SharePoint. He also notes that InfoPath 2007 is much improved over the previous version, which had problems with having to install the InfoPath software on individual clients.
Of course, InfoPath is not the right electronic forms solution for every company.
"Like everything Microsoft does, InfoPath tends to be very departmental or SMB focused rather than enterprise focused," says Le Clair. "The form solutions from the two other major providers, Adobe and IBM with its Lotus Forms [product], in general tend to be used for more sophisticated forms applications."
For example, says Le Clair, a government agency that's creating a portal for citizens and has on the order of 1,000 forms to manage would be well served by Adobe's suite. An insurance company that uses IBM's content management system on its back end might be more inclined to use Lotus Forms because it integrates with the CMS.
--M. Levinson
InfoPath's Benefits
Campbell says part of InfoPath's value stems from its digital signature feature, which helps ensure the validity of the information on the form.
"Once I fill out a form and sign it, it can't be altered," he says. "The digital signature provides some level of validation that the form is not going to be modified."
Consequently, the digital signature features helps build users' trust in the new electronic forms and processes.
Another benefit of InfoPath, according to Campbell, is the reporting capabilities it enables. Since his IT group created an electronic form for researchers to request histology services (e.g. stained slides), the histology department has been using the data InfoPath culls from those forms and pulls into an SQL database to report on the number and type of tissues it processes each year and for each lab. Campbell says this kind of reporting, which the histology department used to have to do manually using spreadsheets, helps the department with its capacity planning and helps it justify the need for additional staff.
Campbell adds that the histology department also uses the data culled from the forms to generate reports they used to charge the individual labs that requested their services back for the cost of those services.
Finally, InfoPath helps Van Andel Institute get data into its enterprise system without having to key it in manually.
"I'm excited we have tools that we can use to automate business processes that aren't associated with another system," says Campbell. "We have a facilities management system, an ERP system and a separate registrar's system. There are pieces of information we need to gather to populate those systems. InfoPath is a good tool to bridge that gap."
