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4月24日 SharePoint on the GoMy friend Laura, who is completely to blame for my SharePoint addiction and I have all of these conversations all of the time about the cool things we are doing with SharePoint and InfoPath. On our recent trip to SharePoint Saturday in Atlanta, we decided to video a few of these conversations. You can see those conversations here: http://spinsiders.com/laurar/webcasts/. You may also view them on http://www.endusersharepoint.com. Hope you watch and enjoy! 4月20日 SharePoint Saturday AtlantaI had the privilege of attending SharePoint Saturday Atlanta on April 18th and live blogging the event. There was a little competition. The St. Louis MOSS Camp was also live blogging the event as well, and a little friendly rivalry broke out between the blogging. It was a fun event and there are some great notes from both events. If you want to view them both, you can do so here: EndUserSharePoint.com. If that is too much, you can view just the SharePoint Saturday Atlanta blogging below. 4月11日 The Rank and File"Hierarchy works well in a stable environment." - Mary Douglas
I haven't met a business process yet that doesn't involve some sort of hierarchy. Most of the ones I am friendly with involve some sort of approval hierarchy. Chances are your organization (like mine) has a different one for each process, department, or location. Some are maintained and integrated with Active Directory, some are so specialized, they can't be integrated and therefore maintenance is not automatic. Since employees come and go, get promoted, demoted, transferred, the hierarchy must be maintained easily, and unless your human resources department designates an FTE to monitor and maintain the changes, you have to figure out a solution. Enter the SharePoint list and an InfoPath form.
For this example, we will create a simple list, but you can create more complex ones as needed.
Create a list with the following columns and types:
Location - Single Line of Text
Approver 1 - Person or group (Person only, do not allow multiple selections)
Approver 2 - Person or group (Person only, do not allow multiple selections)
Create a few items.
 Restrict all users to read only access and only have a specific group of people with contribute or full control permissions. Set these users up in a SharePoint group, you will use this group later.
In order to allow all users the ability to update the hierarchy, create a form in InfoPath. Ensure you put in a data connection in the form to the approval hierarchy list.
At minimum, include the following fields:
Location being updated (Drop-Down List Box using the data connection to look up the locations from your list)
Approver being updated (Drop-Down List Box using Approver 1 or Approver 2 as your choices)
Contact Selector (You can see how to add and configure the contact selector here)
 I also added fields for contact information and a reason for the hierarchy change, to ensure that the changes were legitimate changes. Add a submit button to allow users to submit the form to a form library. Publish your form to the form library in the same site as your SharePoint List; ensure you promote all of the field properties into the library so that you can create a workflow using this data. Set the form library to require content approval, set the group you designated earlier as approvers for this library and allow all others to contribute forms. Customizing permission levels is your option, as is setting the library to open the form in the browser only.
Open SharePoint Designer and create a workflow to start when a new item is created in the form library.
For the first step, notify the group designated as approvers of the new submission and provide a link to the form as well as a link to approve or reject the form.
Pause until the value of the Approval Status changes.
Second step, set condition that if the form is approved to change the item in the approval list that matches the location selected in the form and the approver column.
Here is the catch, you have to use the AccountId field from the Contact Selector as the new value to update a column of the Person or Group type otherwise, the data will not update.
Now your approval heirarchy list can be maintained by users who do not have direct access to the approval heirarchy. You also have all of the data about why a change was made as well as who requested it and the approval process for audit purposes.
Tips:
* Be sure you have completed the steps to allow you to run a declarative workflow. You can find those steps here: http://blogs.technet.com/victorbutuza/default.aspx. If this is not done, you will get an error updating the list with Access Denied.
* Log to history regularly during your workflow for troubleshooting.
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