Last week I published my first InfoPath form and discovered that some users could not access or submit the form.
Our users access SharePoint sites and our InfoPath form in 1 of 3 different ways:
- Via the Intranet: http://intranet
- Via the Extranet: http://extranet.ourcompany.com
- Via the ISA Server: http://intranet.ourcompany.othercompany.com
The form is set to domain trust, published from InfoPath as a site content type and associated with a SharePoint document library (browser compatible) at
http://intranet.
Looking at our network configuration i placed a big bet that the problem was something to do with the fact that we were using host headers so i started searching google for anything related.
The following post seemed exactly the same as our scenario:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2777878&SiteID=17I toyed with the idea of changing the host headers and tried publishing the form in as many different ways as possible (domain trust direct to a doc library, full trust, administrator approved & managed through Central Administration etc etc). No luck.
Problem 1 Detail: Intranet & Extranet users could access and submit the form. However there were access problems for ISA server users with the following error message:
The following location is not accessible, because it is in a different site collection: http://intranet.ourcompany.othercompany.
com/Infopath/Forms/template.xsn
The solution:
To resolve this I added the
http://intranet.ourcompany.othercompany.com URL to the alternate access mappings in Central Administration and users were immediately then able to open the form.
Problem 2 Detail:The following error message was generated on submitting the form (also for ISA server users):
The form cannot be submitted to the Web server either because your computer is offline or because the host server is currently unavailable. If this problem persists, contact your network administrator.
On closing the form users were then redirected to
http://intranet (the URL that the form is published to in InfoPath) which of course they could not access.
The solution:We had to search high and low for the answer which thankfully came from the following post:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2386461&SiteID=1Basically
we added a Link Translation rule in the ISA Server to replace the FQDN InternalDomain with ExternalDomain (Without http://)
Eg:
- http://intranet.ourcompany.othercompany.com
- intranet.ourcompany.othercompany.com
The form is now working correctly for all users. Thanks to John Gao, where ever you are, for finding the solution!!