Question

How do you manage deploying InfoPath forms to different sharepoint servers? Is there a better way to deal all the data connections being site-specific without opening the forms, editing the data connections and republishing for each environment?

Answer 1

If I understand your scenario correctly:

You have an InfoPath form, with data connections that submit your data. You wish to deploy this form on multiple SharePoint Servers and have those data connections submit data to the currently deployed server.

You can’t really get around needing to do work on every SharePoint server that you would want to deploy the form to. However, you can get around needing to modify the InfoPath Form Template.

If you use the SharePoint Data Connection Library (DCL), and create a UDC file from your data connection, on every SharePoint Server that you would want to use…then your InfoPath Template can just talk to the UDC file.

Here’s a link to an article about integrating InfoPath with SharePoint’s DCL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb267335.aspx