Tag Archives: InfoPath

Content Approval as Poor Man’s Automatic Item Level Security

There’s a common business scenario with InfoPath forms.  We want allow people to fill out InfoPath forms and submit them to a library.  We want mangers (and no one else) to have access to those forms.

This question comes up now and then on the forms (e.g. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/76ccef5a-d71c-4b7c-963c-613157e2a966/?prof=required)

A quick way to solve this is to enable content approval on the form library.  Go the library’s version settings and set it up as shown:

image 

Click on “Require content approval” and that will allow you to pick a value for Draft Item Security.

It’s a little counter-intuitive because we don’t think in terms of “content approval” when all we want to do is prevent people from seeing other users’ forms.  However, it works well (in my experience).  Just don’t approve those forms and they’ll always be considered “drafts”. 

Give approval rights to the people who should be able to see them and you’ve closed the loop.

This isn’t exactly big news, but the question does come up with some regularity, so I thought it would be worth posting.

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