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.
The other day I decided to start a power user best practice series. I started with site columns and now the next logical step is content types. I have found that many times experienced users don’t realise the importance of a properly setup content type. Because of this, they often are recreating the same data, having to redo the content types and in some cases blow them away and start over (both of which are a real pain if the CT is already being used). The intent of this post is to cover the best ways to create your content types.
So today I am starting a new series on SharePoint Best Practices. This may seem like a fairly simple topic but, I have come to learn that it is an important one. I am not talking about best practices in setting up and configuring SharePoint or how to best develop a solution in SharePoint. I am instead wanting to discuss best practices in your day to day usage of SharePoint. Too many times I have worked with experienced clients that have a decent knowledge of how to do things in SharePoint, but don’t think of the little things that make these best practices. This is where this series is coming from. Today I am going to cover site columns.
All too often when building workflows in SharePoint Designer there is a need to pause the workflow for a duration of time, or while waiting for values to change within SharePoint list\library. Microsoft has provided methods or actions within a workflow to accommodate this for quite some time. The method to accomplish while similar between versions has changed with the latest iteration of SharePoint Designer. For this reason I wanted to discuss waiting in a SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow today. I know that most are now moving to SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint online, but while Microsoft has released newer versions of SharePoint, it hasn’t released a new version of Designer since 2013. So whether you are on SharePoint 2013 or a later version, this post is relevant for the foreseeable future.