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:
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/
We recently ran into a need to create custom lists in SharePoint that send emails when an item is assigned to a person. By default, a custom list does not offer the ability to send an email when a list item is assigned. However, the “Tasks” list type does, so we used it in a simple – but clever – workaround. Here was our approach:
- Create a new Task list
- Go into the List Settings and remove all of the columns other than Title, Assigned To, Created By, and Modified By
- Save the list as a template called “Custom List with Assignment Email”
Now when we need to create a custom list that emails users when they have an item assigned to them, we simply start with the new list template and add the columns and views we need, rather than starting with the standard “Custom List” template. Simple, effective, no code, and easy for users to implement on their own.
