Body: In SharePoint Designer workflows that are manually started, the initiation form is the page that has the “Start” button to kick off the workflow.  In this 11 minute video, I show how to create an approval workflow that can be manually triggered

Body: In InfoPath, when using certain controls such as the Drop-Down List Box, Combo Box, List Box, or Multiple Selection List box, there are several different ways that you can obtain the list of choices that are available to people filling out the

Body: Last month was the International SharePoint Conference in London. I was honored to be invited to be a speaker at the conference. The format of the conference was great. Not only were there different tracks, but within each track, there were

Body: Have you ever published changes in a workflow in SharePoint Designer and wish you hadn't? There is a little known way to go in and restore a previous version of your workflow. This uses the same versioning capability that lists and libraries ha

Body: There is a quick and easy way that information about the logged in user can be obtained from within an InfoPath form. You may have read my blog and other blogs before, with the user profile service web service instructions. In this post, I'm no

Body: Only one more month until the big International SharePoint Conference in London!  This is going to be a great one, with a format that I’m very excited about.  The conference is organized into tracks.  These are not just tracks like “IT Pro” and

Body: Can’t wait!  SharePoint Saturday comes to my home town again!!  This Saturday, March 24th, is the third annual SharePoint Saturday in New Orleans.  I grew up down there, mostly in a small town on the west bank of New Orleans, called Luling.  T

Body: In this second post of the three part blog series, I will show how you can show or hide fields according to whether or not the currently logged in person is part of a certain SharePoint group. This is a three part blog: Part 1: Using an ASPX

Body: Three years ago, I wrote a blog post called Displaying SharePoint Fields by Permission Level.  This one has the highest amount of hits, but it is an imperfect solution.  One of the most common questions that was asked was to see if there's a wa

Body: This morning I'm beyond thrilled to announce that Rackspace has purchased SharePoint911. Now all of us are Rackspace employees, AKA "Rackers". Back in January, our team took a trip out to San Antonio to the RackSpace headquarters, to meet our f

Body: We like to give people the freedom to add content to SharePoint as they wish in most cases, and we like them to be able to add announcements on their site whenever they need to. Do you ever cringe when you look at a SharePoint site, because of

Body: You have all of this data in SharePoint, and you have all of this information about the site users, such as their department names, phone numbers, and much more. Instead of asking for site users to fill out all of their pertinent information e

Body: Forms and security. It is a common requirement to have a form that can be filled out, and when it is submitted, it goes to a location that the form submitter does not have access to. This is tricky because the users need to have contribute acce

Body: Hi, I just wanted everyone to know about two webinars.  One is coming up this week, and the other has happened in the past and is available as a recording. This Week - How to Use Content Types in SharePoint Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 T

Body: There are a couple of buttons in InfoPath forms by default called “Save” and “Save As”.  I never ever (ever) like to use these, and immediately disable them.  I don’t like these buttons because it gives the end users the freedom to save the for

Body:   To wrap up 2011, here are the most popular posts on my blog site.  These posts were not necessarily written this year, but they are the ones that received the most comments in 2011.  With a total of 865 comments this year, here are the top 10

Body: When assigning tasks in SharePoint workflows, you may have noticed that each task that gets assigned has one field that associates it with the original list or library item where the workflow task came from.  You may have noticed the “Related C

Body: In SharePoint and SharePoint Online with Office 365, permissions have always been one of the major pain points when it comes to end users, training and adoption. The user interface on the permissions screens, and the complexity revolving around

Body: You may have seen my webinars or presentations about approval processes in SharePoint, or my rants about the difference between assigning tasks and sending emails.  On our weekly SharePoint Shop Talk conference call, I did a couple of demos rec

Body: It is a common requirement of InfoPath projects to make a form in a form library, where the name of the XML file is the same as the ID of the item itself.  There are several methods I’ve seen out there, and I’m definitely not the first person t

Body: How to get information from one SharePoint site to another is one of the most common type of questions that I come across.  When you have SharePoint 2010 Enterprise or SharePoint Online E3 or E4, most any SharePoint list can be customized using

Body: In many cases in InfoPath, especially when testing, it is helpful to be able to click to go directly to a specific view of a form.  Of course, you can always insert a button in a form whose action is to switch views, and use a formatting rule t

Body: When using InfoPath 2010 with SharePoint, it is common to create workflows to send a link to the form.  The most common thing in my experience is an approval process.  Each time the form needs to be approved, the next approver is sent an email

Body: This post applies to all versions of SharePoint and Office 365. If you ever wanted to filter a datasheet view of a list or a Gantt view via parameter or web part connection, you may have noticed that there is no option to create this type of fi

Body: With InfoPath and SharePoint 2010, one of the awesome new capabilities is that you can query specific SharePoint list data from data connections that receive from SharePoint lists and libraries.  This applies to all versions of SharePoint 2010