At its heart, you can think of InfoPath as being a forms engine. Drag the item you need onto the page, wire it up to a data source, and you have something akin to Microsoft Access. But that's where the similarities end.

The data that InfoPath works with isn't standard RDBMS (relational database management system) information; it's XML data held in an XML Schema. These are just text objects, which you might store on a database, a file system or inside a business infrastructure that consumes and generates XML.

The principle of operation is simple. Open up an XML Schema or create one on the fly. Create a form in design mode, and drag and drop the Schema items onto the page, wiring them up to controls and objects. Then apply rules and logical processing to the form item to handle the normal rules and exceptions. Finally, point it at an XML data source and it loads up the data for editing. Save the XML, and maybe even post it to a BizTalk engine.

Although InfoPath looks deceptively simple, it encompasses a huge amount of new thinking for Microsoft. What you're seeing in InfoPath is much more than just a forms filling engine – it's the future object model interface of the Microsoft user experience and, as such, its impact will be profound.

In the short term, anyone working with XML will embrace InfoPath. If you're not currently working in or towards an XML environment, it doesn't offer much, but future versions will be very important for the next generation of middle-tier technologies from Microsoft.