Seeking advice

Hello Everyone,

    I would like to share my situation with everyone here so I can get your advice on the best course of action for me and my team.

I work in an IT Department that supports several schools and education centers, we have been using SharePoint for over a year now for sharing files and creating simple forms with static workflows, our SharePoint server is hosted and managed by another team so we do not have access to its central administration and SharePoint Designer is disabled on the server and we couldn’t get access to neither, Also, we are not developers, we are more on the system administration side.

We are trying to create new forms with advanced dynamic workflows, for example, create a workflow where based on the submitter it will choose the next three approvers, or another workflow where the approvers are chosen dynamically again based on the submitter but each approver gets access to a section in the form where he\she fills it then forwards it to next approver where another section gets filled and so on till the workflow ends.

Since SharePoint Designer is disabled as I mentioned earlier, we are not able to create these complex workflows for our forms, we only use the built-in workflows settings, we are currently looking for alternatives to create our own forms away from the SharePoint administrators since it been 4 months now and they didn’t even start the development phase for one of the forms we have requested from them.

I have been looking into some 3rd party services such as K2, Nintax and Formotus to be able to create the required forms ourselves but I am not sure if this the best way to go, I know that I can design forms and workflows using visual basic but as I mentioned we are not developers and I am not even sure if we will be able to import these new forms into our SharePoint because of the restricted access.

Looking forward to hear your advice on our situation.

Thanks.

Moustafa