SharePoint and InfoPath Data Extraction…

I have worked over the last few years much with business process automation and especially with SharePoint. Here is a somewhat straightforward solution/approach to automate a much used, but manual process in SharePoint. Let’s say you have a document library that users upload documents to. Unless you subscribe to the library and want to be notified, not much really happens when the document lands in the library. So, what if you could have SharePoint take action immediately and initiate, let’s say a Workflow, or simply store the values somewhere else, or email a user with the details…or anything else that you want? And not just with the fact that a document was uploaded (that is already built-in), but, even better, with data from the actual document… Let me walk you through the scenario: we start out with one of the sample InfoPath forms: Asset Tracking and we publish a Form Library based off this InfoPath form to SharePoint. We end up with an empty Form Library as shown below....