Strausy's O365/SharePoint KB

Issue: Recently a user stated they were getting an error message in Outlook stating "Outlook cannot open a new form. The form contains schema validation errors." when they clicked on the Open this Task button in a SharePoint Task assignment email. Root Cause: The user had created an out-of-the-box Approval workflow and inside the Request box had entered several HTML tags like <a href="site">link</a> where the site reference in the href was outside of SharePoint. Resolution: While I don't recommend putting HTML tags in the Task assignment emails in workflows, it will work if you reference the same SharePoint site or site collection the Task is coming from.

I've had mixed results with pausing SharePoint Designer workflows based on a duration. Inevitably it will work a few times and then stop for no apparent reason when the pause duration ended. It could be the environment, a service pack level, or even a hotfix needing to be applied. I was using the "Collect Data from User" action in a workflow and I needed to update the Title and pause for a while so that the Task List's Related Content field matched. (more detail in the Background) Pausing for any duration did not work. It simply stated "Failed to run" after pausing. I did some research and found lots of hits on this, but nothing I could actually do. I didn't have physical access to the server to apply a hotfix or run any stsadm commands. So I tried a different approach as outlined below. 1) Added a status column on the first list, the one processing the information that the Task assignment workflow ran on 2) Modified my first workflow to on...

I will reiterate that most my posts are not for the true SharePoint Developer. Those using Visual Studio to do most, if not all, of this custom application will find better ways for the most part. No, this post is for people who want to use SharePoint out of the box and then have found themselves using SharePoint Designer workflows. A reoccurring problem I have is that when I create a SharePoint Designer Workflow and decide later I need to redo it. I create a workflow that assigns a task and name that say "Task 1". This creates a list content type and a site content type. Later I delete that section of my workflow, but I go back later to add it again, choosing the name it Task 1 again, but you get an error messaging stating it is already in use. Knowing full well you were the one that deleted it, how do you go about using that same name? First, go to you Task list settings. There will be a section called Content Types. Select the one you want (in this case Task 1) and d...