Centrally-managed InfoPath data connection libraries

Call it laziness if you will. I never got around to testing the use of InfoPath data connections in a centrally-managed library. I hadn't given much consideration to the benefits of placing UDCs there instead of a Data Connection library.

Well, I tried it for the first time yesterday, and wow, there's one really really large benefit - it's MUCH faster than placing them in document libraries. I assume there's some overhead having to do with checking permissions, plus there's likely a dedicated service path to get centrally-managed UDCs whereas I expect InfoPath uses the List service to fetch them in IPFS forms. In my old environment, when opening new forms that had list data connections that load on initialization, form launch would often take 5-10 seconds, whereas now it's a tenth of that.

I hope this performance holds out in 2010! Now, if only the administration/management of those UDCs was more refined...