Activate or deactivate a form template for a site collection

Note: You must belong to the site collection administrator group to complete the task described in this article.

Activation is the process used to turn features in a site or site collection on or off. Because administrator-approved form templates are considered site collection features in InfoPath Forms Services, they must be activated before they can be used. When you activate an administrator-approved form template, you make it available to be used in a site collection as a content type for a document library or open it directly from the form template library for the site collection.

Use the following procedure to activate or deactivate an administrator-approved form template:

1. In your site collection, on the Site Actions menu , click Site Settings.

   Note: In sites where the Site Actions menu is customized, point to Site Settings, and then click Modify All Site Settings.

2. Under Site Collection Administration, click Site collection features.

3. On the Site Collection Features page, find the row for the form template that you want, and then click Activate or Deactivate.

   Notes: 

   • If you deactivate a form template, existing form-filling sessions will be terminated, and users that are filling out forms based on that form template will lose their data. Unless a security risk or other emergency requires you to immediately deactivate a form template, you should ask a member of the farm administrator's group to quiesce the form template. Quiescing takes the form template offline by preventing new sessions from being started while ensuring that existing sessions are allowed to complete — up to the time limit set in Central Administration. Unless they go past the time limit, users can finish filling out forms without losing the data that they have already entered. When a farm administrator quiesces a form template, all instances of that form template in every site collection are taken offline.

   • When a farm administrator uploads a newer version of an existing form template — a process called upgrading — the existing form template does not always need to be quiesced. For example, if users can simply stop using an existing form, and start using the new one, quiescing the existing form template is unnecessary. When upgrading a form template, the farm administrator needs to quiesce an existing form template only when it is necessary to help ensure that no users can access the existing form template, and that the new form template needs to completely replace the old one.

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