I found an interesting gotcha with Sharepoint and InfoPath yesterday.  A user called me about an error they were receiving when submitting a web-enabled form.  The error was "An error occurred while the form was being submitted".  It's a pretty generic error, so I started searching.

My form calls a web service, userprofileservice, to gather the user name and department from AD.  When the form is submitted, it automatically titles the file, "Selected Year + UserName", i.e. "2009 John Doe".  In the case of this user, his name was "John Doe, Jr."  What I found was Sharepoint does not allow a period "." at the end of a file name within a list or document library.  In fact, there are several invalid characters.  So, I changed the automatic naming to "Selected Year + UserName + 'Plan'", i.e. "2009 John Doe, Jr. Plan".  This worked perfectly and the form submits.

Thanks to this blog for helping with the solutions: http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2007/04/26/20302.aspx

Working with a trial version of Adobe Captivate 2, I created a series of training video projects related to Sharepoint training.  I had purchased the full version, but didn't realize I had not upgraded to it when I worked on these training videos.  I completed the training videos and sent them to my customer.  Of course, after a few weeks, the videos started displaying an expiration message.  My customer had not informed me it was doing this and a few months went by.  When they finally called me about this issue, I had already upgraded to Adobe Captivate 3.  So I proceeded to open the trial-version projects in v3 and publish them.  It asked me if I wanted to overwrite my existing project to upgrade to v3 and I accepted.  I assumed this would take care of the expiration problem.  It did not.  The newly published project was still showing "Project has expired".

After hunting online, I found a solution.  In the Preferences, there is a section called Start and End.  In this section, there is a checkbox for the expiration of a project.  The original project had been in a trial version and the expiration time had been set.  When it was imported/upgraded to v3, Captivate automatically set the expiration to the trial expiration date.  All I had to do was un-check the box to set the project to not expire.

You have to try out Microsoft's new tool called PopFly.  They just released the beta version today and it is a blast to use.  I created an aggregated feed of Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com.  I was able to filter and sort the feeds.  There is so much more to this tool.  Check it out.  http://www.popfly.ms

The spell check issue has been posted elsewhere, but I thought I would give my own experience.  I had one user who could not use spell check when entering an Announcement on their site.  The site had broken permissions (uninherited) and new groups created specifically for the site.  I eventually had to re-inherit parent permissions to get it to work.  I think this is a bug.  It should not matter if they have inherited permissions or custom.  As long as they have contribute rights, they should be given all necessary functionality.

Just want to put in the good word about DevConnections, specifically the Sharepoint Connections sessions at the conference...

I attended this conference earlier this year in Orlando.  It was really good with a lot of content about Sharepoint.  There are many other sessions going on related to .NET, Visual Studio, SQL, etc.  You are free to attend any of these other classes with the purchase of one conference pass.  I really enjoyed seeing the latest in Windows Mobile technology.

Look forward to seeing you there in Vegas...

P.S. If you have the stomach, try these out when you are there, especially Big Shot.  Awesome experience!