Office Forms Server 2007 makes available to the end user InfoPath 2007 forms, whether the client is a Microsoft Office system client or only a browser. Office Forms Server 2007 provides several benefits, two of which are particularly important. First, Office Forms Server provides a consistent, secure, and robust mechanism to more easily handle n-tier solutions. Second, Forms Server 2007 provides what has been called the reach experience. This allows people who do not have the InfoPath 2007 client software installed on their machines to fill out and view Office InfoPath forms using their Web browser. This ability is called zero footprint form fill-in. With the addition of Forms Server 2007, InfoPath is poised to become the new de facto standard for generating and filling out forms in an enterprise.
Forms Server 2007 is built on top of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This underpinning allows Forms Server 2007 to supply several valuable abilities to the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system. Its most notable feature is the ability to fill in forms on a remote computer using only a Web browser, including Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Apple Computers Safari. In addition, InfoPath 2007 forms can contain Microsoft .NET-managed code that performs a wide variety of valuable functions, such as automatically totaling prices on a purchase order or invoice.