Yes, I know the title of this site is "SharePoint for the Non-Developer". That implies, to me, that this is for someone that does not code. Well, I had to enter the "developer" world.
A little background information...our "old" intranet had several submit forms where a user would complete the information, hit the "submit" or "send" button and the information on the form would be sent to an e-mail address. Until recently, we've been using InfoPath for these things. We have run into a few issues though. The biggest issue is our company does not have the Enterprise SharePoint license. If we did, we could have web enabled the InfoPath forms and we probably wouldn't have encountered the following issues.
Not only did we not have the Enterprise license, we also don't have a consistent image across the board. Some people have Office 2003, some receive the Office Suite via Softricity. InfoPath requires a local install, and the forms are really happier if they are InfoPath 2007. Oh, and some do not have InfoPath at all, and there is no plan for that to change.
All of this means InfoPath is not a good solution for our company when it comes to simple submit forms that do not require a workflow, but are simply meant for some form of feedback.
What now? Well, after much research I finally found a solution on http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/SharePointContactForm.aspx
This is where I learned how to create a new WEB PART, yes web part, that is a submit form. this is written in C# and deployed with a .wsp just like any other web part.
If customized solutions that require code scare you, give this a try. Try it on a development box. Give yourself about two - three days if you have no Visual Studio experience just to fumble around. I had a little experience and it took me about a day - day and a half.
Happy SharePointing :)
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