A common business requirement for InfoPath forms is to prevent the form from being edited after submission to the form library.  While there are several ways to accomplish this task, including editing item level permissions, using audiences or setting a flag via a workflow, many environments can deploy a much easier solution.  You can use these steps to implement a simple read only on submit solution.

While testing the SharePoint 2010 Upgrade on several of our internal environments and in preparation of upgrades some of our clients, we have been actively testing sites for potential upgrade failures.

One of the items causing post upgrade headaches are the application templates available for SharePoint Services 3.0/SharePoint 2007.  Many small and mid-size organizations took advantage of these templates due to their quick deployment and ease of use.  Most contained specialized Content Types, Designer Workflows and custom lists that could be easily modified to fit a wide range of business processes or functions.

While upgrading these templates appears to occur without issue, as the sites still render in the new SharePoint 2010 environment, there are some features that do not upgrade cleanly.

Fox example, some sites have custom xaml based web parts that provide dashboard functionality such as the Service Rep Manager Dashboard in the Help Desk Site.  On this page, the Priority graph web part and Average. Resolution Time web parts are broken.  

More concerning, are sites using the Knowledge Base Article and related content types.  For Sites such as the Help Desk site, Call center and Knowledgebase Wiki Templates, the Knowledgebase Document Library is unusabl.   New Wiki items cannot be added to the Knowledgebase list via the New Form and existing Wiki items cannot be viewed via the Display Form .  

Make sure that you have a plan in place if you are currently using any of the templates.  Recreating the Knowledgebase functionality and non-functional web parts manually on the newly upgraded SharePoint 2010 environment may be time consuming but it may be the only option for some companies who are unable or unwilling to wait for the issue to be corrected before upgrading.  The SharePoint Team is working on a patch that is expected to fix the Knowledge Base Article Content Type issue sometime in the Late August/Early September timeframe.

While the SharePoint Project Site template and Task List Gantt Chart view is a nice tool for team collaboration on projects, it has not been very helpful in managing larger projects that require administration from within Microsoft Project.  This usually results in additional work or cutting and pasting of tasks from project into the Datasheet view in SharePoint.  

Well, while researching functionality for a client project, I came across a wonderful plug-in for Microsoft Project that performs the synchronization with a SharePoint list from Team Direction called IntelliGantt Microsoft Project Add In.   My experience with this tool has been very positive and I believe this tool would provide a significant return on investment over time for companies that want to collaborate on projects within SharePoint.  In addition, the plug in is deployed on the client workstation or laptop and does not require any components to be deployed to SharePoint. 

With the SharePoint 2010 official launch occurring on May12th, we complete our series of articles reviewing the new features of SharePoint 2010 with a look at the Administrative enhancements, System Requirements and Upgrade Path for SharePoint.   One major improvement in SharePoint 2010 over previous versions is the overall stability and availability of SharePoint.   There are several related new features from the infrastructure and administrative perspective that are worth noting.