My Sharepoint Learnings

When a new document is added to the doc library, a task email is sent to the approvers to review the doc. The due date for the task can be set in the workflow. If one of the approvers, approves the doc, the workflow is ended. Go to the document library, and from the ribbon, click on Workflow settings – Add a workflow In Add a workflow page, select Approval workflow and enter a name for the workflow Note – The out of box workflows are of SharePoint 2010 template. To use SharePoint 2013 template, the workflow has to be created with SharePoint Designer 2013. Also, if there are no approval workflow templates, go to Site Settings – Site collection features and activate Workflow. Set the workflow to be started manually and when an item is created. As approvers, a person or group can be set. If there is more than one stage of approval, a new stage can be added and the action can be set to follow the parallel or serial sequence. In parallel sequence, the approval stages will happen to...

Workflows are of 3 types - List workflow, reusable workflow and site workflow. Usually site workflows, are started based on some timer jobs. But it can be started manually, from the site contents page. There is a link called site workflows in site content page as shown When clicked on Site workflow, it would display all the workflows associated with the site. By clicking on the name of the workflow, the site workflow can be started manually.

In SPD workflows, under Actions, there is a set of Utility functions. Using the substring function, a string can be trimmed from the beginning/end/or from a position, with or without specifying the length. An example, to remove the domain part from the user name, e.g. abcdomain/username, follow the below steps 1.        Use “Extract substring from the index of string” 2.        It would insert a step in WF as “Copy from string , starting at 0 (Output to Variable: substring ) 3.        Click on ‘string’ and click fx to get the field to be trimmed. 4.        It would bring the look-up window. 5.        Select the field and click OK. In this e.g., Data Source: Current Item and Field from Source: Created By 6.        To set the index, click on 0 and enter the required number, here it would be 1...

The max number of workflow running is by default set to 15. This is applicable for both SPD and visual studio workflows. The number does not include the workflow instances which is 'In progress' state. The number represents the number of active workflows using the processor and it is set for the entire farm and does not depend on the number of front end servers. The number can be configured using powershell command Set-SPFarmConfig More can be read from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607962(v=office.14).aspx The existing farm settings can be obtained using the command Get-SPFarmConfig Reference < http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607745(v=office.14).aspx > To know more about SharePoint workflow performance and scalability parameters read the msdn article - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441390(office.12).aspx More about SharePoint 2010 workflow http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh237664(v=office.14)...

It might be required that in a serial workflow with mutliple stages, there might be more than one users. The workflow should proceed to next step, if one of them completes the step. For e.g., consider there are 2 groups of reviwers, say Group A and Group B. When an item is created, an email would be send to Group A users. If one of the members in Group A completes the task, it should send mail to Group B users. In such scenarios, create 2 sharepoint groups, one for Group A and one for Group B. Add all the members to the respective groups. Create the workflow in SPD and after first action, assign the task to Sharepoint Group A. Now if anyone of the users in Group A completes the task, the task status changes to completed and the next step would be continued. It does not require that all members in Group A complete the task assigned.

When trying to click on Open this task from Outlook 2010, it brings an error - " Outlook cannot open a new form. The form contains schema validation errors" Element '{ http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}div ' is unexpected according to the content model of parent element '{ http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2009/WSSList/dataFields}Body '. As given in the error message, the issue is with the Body column of the workflow tasks list. For the approval workflow, there would be a tasks list. In the workflow task list, the Body column is Enhance Rich multi-line column. Change the setting to Plain text, instead of enhanced rich text. After that do an iisreset.

When trying to upload document or attachment, the error "The URL 'XXX' is invalid. It may refer to a nonexistent file or folder, or refer to a valid file or folder that is not in the current Web. " comes up. This could come up if Sharepoint 2010 is installed as stand-alone server and the content DB has reached 4GB. When SP2010 is installed as stand-alone server, it stores all the databases in SQL Express 2008, which comes bundled with SP2010. It would not configure to any other server instances, even if it is installed in the server. To resolve the issue, refer the link http://www.smattie.com/2012/04/14/how-to-fix-sql-server-express-db-size-limitation-of-4-gb/ Or else take a backup of the farm and uninstall Sharepoint 2010 and reinstall as a single server farm installation. Configure it with SQL 2008 developer or enterprise edition or with SQL 2008 R2 edition. Restore the content DB to the new setup and perform a DB upgrade command on the restored content DB. ...