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Challenge:

When I was approached by a co-worker to come up a quick solution to design a training registration application. The requirement is to display all upcoming training events in calendar view and allow users to register to each training. And upon the registration is submitted, the training department and the user’s supervisor should receive notifications immediately (although not required now, but might need the approval from the supervisor in later development). The deadline is very…, how to say it, … how about this afternoon. Well, while the co-worker asked how to design the database tables and asp.net coding, I suggested why not giving the SharePoint a shot. Since I am the one proposed, then I had to create it for her.

Well, that was what I came up so far. In our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server System (MOSS) 2007 with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS), I created a calendar list to display training events; in the calendar item there was a link to another new created survey list acting as a registration form. Then I added a workflow to the survey so that emails will be sent out whenever a new response is added into the survey (or register list).

Everything is working fine, but however, the workflow does not start. Instead, the status of the workflow appears as Failed to Start.

Trouble-Shootings:

I searched this issue on Google, and I found out a lot of people had the similar errors before. Someone pointed out the cause was the user of application pool who should be Network Services instead of a user with administrative right; Someone suggested to re-active the workflow feature in SharePoint Application server; Someone asked whether it was done in SharePoint Designer  2007.

Continue reading ‘Can not start a workflow from a survey response in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (MOSS 2007) with "Failed to Start" error’