I’m a fan of what is probably the least known of the Office products. InfoPath is intended to be used as a digital form editing and browsing tool. Using it you can completely do away with the need of paper forms (excluding regulatory requirements) in your office. This not only does your bit to save the rain forests but also makes your organisation more responsive to change.
I’ve used InfoPath 2003 in the past for managing projects and for employee timesheets. The form was published onto Sharepoint for easy access and storage. My usage was quite basic. I was hoping to expand its usage to include all of our process that required forms. Unfortunately, that was when our department was moved to Germany.
The data could be stored in the forms or in a SQL database. Data was validated using rules. Drop down dialogs cou be pre-populated. Most of all, if you have deployed certificates, e.g. deployed an enterprise CA and certificate auto enrollment for users, then you could require that users of the form sign them, thus guaranteeing that person X did actually fill the form. You could extend this using workflow for automated processing of the forms.
InfoPath 2007 was released with the Office 2007 system. Microsoft has made step-by-step training available. It also includes a set of downloadable samples.