There are already a ton of posts out there where a SharePoint 2013 workflow becomes stuck at started or starting. Well I have another one. This problem actually originated in a SharePoint 2013 farm. If you are using SharePoint Online, the cause is actually pretty easy to determine. So for those of you not lucky enough to be working with SharePoint Online, I will go through the symptoms you could come across and a possible resolution.
Had a colleague ask me the other day if there was a limit on the People Picker control in SharePoint. Reason being is that she had a Person field setup to accept multiple users and had a group that was constantly getting the error “Item cannot be more than 256 characters” when trying to enter the users. After a bit more digging, found out they were using a list of about 20 people or so and then just pasting them into the people picker box. They had everything correct with semicolon separators and everything, but kept getting that error.
These days it is really easy to create lists and libraries to store data and documents. It is also very easy to build metadata to support the information you are trying to store. However, as I have stated before it is also very easy to set things up incorrectly. This next post in my Power User Best Practices is going to cover what you should and shouldn’t do with a SharePoint List and Library.