The Acuff Group is proud to present our latest white paper: “A Manager’s Guide to SharePoint.”
A great deal has been written about the technical aspects of SharePoint. While this body of knowledge is critically important to the SharePoint ecosystem, the non-technical aspects of deploying and maintaining the platform in large organizations are somewhat underrepresented in the literature. This white paper was written to help address this gap; our goal in writing it was to provide insights, advice, best practices, and real-world experience to help organizations understand and address these non-technical issues.
We hope this paper is useful to you and your organization. We will do our best to keep the document up to date and we’d love to hear your comments and feedback. If you see any errors, feel that important topics are missing, or would just like to connect online please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Our sincere thanks to the following folks who donated their time and expertise to help improve the paper:
Just a quick tip for anyone designing an InfoPath-based solution that uses the built-in file attachment control. We’ve recently built an application that uses browser-based InfoPath forms, a set of SharePoint designer workflows, and a series of custom lists and libraries. Everything works beautifully until the size of the attached files starts to get over a few megabytes. While there are settings in Central Admin that allow you to boost up the size of form submissions, we’re finding both instability and a tendency for the workflows to fire before the form finishes uploading – generally resulting in failures and a bad user experience. So a quick tip to make sure you thoroughly test attachments in your environment if you’re going to use this control, and make sure you know where the “breaking point” is for your infrastructure.
Update: after spending a few days off and on with Microsoft’s Premier Support it sounds like this is a known issue between InfoPath and SharePoint. Unfortunately they didn’t have much to offer other than some code samples to build a workaround in .Net. One trick that we developed was to add short pauses to the workflows, which does help ensure the workflow actions don’t fire prematurely. If your application requirements allow it, you may want to stay away from the file attachment control and simply have your users put documents into libraries and then include a link in the InfoPath form.
We recently ran into a problem with InfoPath browser-based forms in a SharePoint farm that uses “explicit inclusion” managed paths. The InfoPath form uses several secondary data connections to pull data from SharePoint lists into the form to populate drop-down controls. The form seemed to work just fine in preview mode, but when we published it to the SharePoint site and opened it in a browser we would get a series of errors (code 5566) and the secondary data connections would fail. Further investigation showed other errors in the SharePoint logs, and after a couple of days of troubleshooting and Google searches we ended up escalating the issue to Microsoft Premier Support.
As it turns out this is a known problem and there is not currently a fix for it. The work-around is to use “wildcard inclusion” on any managed paths, and in our testing it appears to work as expected. When we publish the same form to a site using the wildcard path, the secondary data connections work just fine and the form functions as designed. We have encountered some other strange issues in the explicit-inclusion sites, such as SharePoint Designer data view webparts losing their connection to linked lists, and while I’m not sure if it’s related or not we don’t see those problems when we’re not in the explicit inclusion sites.
If you’ve encountered this same issue hopefully this blog post will save you a bit of time and a call to Microsoft. I haven’t received a link to a specific knowledge base article, but if I do I’ll update the post. Here are a few links to other user postings that might help:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288905.aspx (see comment at the bottom)
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=33610469&threadid=33610468
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointinfopath/thread/851c5baf-1c81-482a-8776-f909b54da565/
