Courtesy of Vlad Catrinescu (Check out his great blog at http://absolute-sharepoint.com/)

 

Last Friday afternoon, the SharePoint team at Microsoft made a few interesting changes on their blog about the future of Forms on SharePoint Lists (FoSL).

For some history on the subject, on January 31st 2014, Microsoft posted a blog post titled “Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms” in which they announced that InfoPath 2013 will be the last version of InfoPath, and they are currently working on a new version of FoSL for both SharePoint Server & Office 365. They promised an update at the SharePoint Conference 2014 in Vegas, and they delivered. Microsoft presented Session number SPC348 at SPC that showed us a new way of editing FoSL directly online! If you want to look at the session, you can find it here: SPC348: Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms

Fast forward to February 6th, 2015 and after 8 months without any news, Microsoft updated their blog post to include the following:

“As part of the update shared around the Evolution of SharePoint and the next SharePoint Server on-premises release, we are also updating the timelines for removal of InfoPath Forms Services components of SharePoint and SharePoint Online. Specifically, InfoPath Forms Services will be included in the next on-premises release of SharePoint Server 2016, as well as being fully supported in Office 365 until further notice. Customers will be able to confidently migrate to SharePoint Server 2016 knowing that their InfoPath forms will continue to work in their on-premises environments, as well as in Office 365.

The InfoPath 2013 application remains the last version to be released and will work with SharePoint Server 2016.”

So, while it’s a good thing that InfoPath 2013 will work in SharePoint Server 2016, and will make migrations so much easier, a lot of SharePointers remembered that FoSL vNext was supposed to be released with SharePoint Server 2016 so Microsoft probably didn’t finish it in time. Read more