Actually that is one of my main tasks at my office now. I develop
Infopath forms for automation through our SharePoint portal. Our desktop
image includes infopath as part of the office install so needing a web
service wasn't an issue (though we do use SP Enterprise, we use digital
signatures a lot, and that required a separate add-on installed to
function....and average users don't have the admin rights to install it.
Working on getting it pushed out, but it isn't a priority)
I basically publish the templates to a form library in SharePoint and
then write workflows designed primarily to notify approvers when it is
their turn using SP Designer.
The infopath forms can be very nice. When published you can have it
create columns for every individual field you want, then once the data
is in SP, you can create views for "Reporting" purposes.
Beware of publishing a template to different libraries though. Hard
lesson learned. I had a form with roughly 150 fields (which translated
to 150 columns in the list in SP). Once you publish it to a list, it is
"tied" to it. If you publish the same template to a different list, then
try to publish it again to the original list (say you update it with a
new field or something) you will find that it no longer recognizes the
field/column connections established during the initial publish. You
will have to manually go in and reconnect each field with its
corresponding column. A solution for this is to make copies of the
template if you intend to publish to multiple lists. Each copy would
then stay tied to a specific list.
This only came up for me when I was toying with a Main submission list
and a separate archive list idea. I have since decided to try and keep
all documents in one list and just change the status.