Friday, July 18, 2003

Is Adobe Targeting Microsoft's InfoPath?

Is Adobe Targeting Microsoft's InfoPath? "But while the two technologies have some similarities, they are not the same. In fact, they will address two different markets.
"In terms of the grand scheme of content generation and content management and things of that nature, there's a lot of comparison between InfoPath and Adobe," Bobby Moore, product manager with InfoPath at Microsoft, told internetnews.com, based on the limited information Adobe has released to date. More will become apparent when the product, expected to be a stand-alone, goes to beta in the fourth quarter.
But whereas Adobe's plans for a PDF/XML Form designer (the product has yet to be named) are geared toward a broad reach scenario in which an organization publishes a form which could then be downloaded by an end-user anywhere, filled in and submitted back to the publisher, Moore said InfoPath is aimed squarely at the knowledge worker and small group collaboration.
"The broad reach scenario where you're posting a form somewhere and you don't know what type of machine [the end user is] running is not actually a scenario that InfoPath is designed for," Moore said.
However, while InfoPath is not designed for such a scenario, that doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't support it. "Visual Studio .NET allows you to design all kinds of Web forms that are schema-compliant," he said."

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