Client
Recently, I helped a world leading pharmaceutical company relying on a critical sharepoint based process managed by the company’s safety director.
Challenge
The client used an infopath form as part of a high-impact safety workflow. however, the validation rules inside the form did not match the actual business logic expected by the safety team. this caused: incorrect validation errors, user confusion, delays in a process where accuracy and speed are essential.
in addition, several views inside the form were connected to large sharepoint lists, creating a risk of hitting the 5,000 item view threshold and impacting performance. The safety system administrator sometimes needed to manually move or adjust elements, which increased the risk of mistakes.
Approach
I worked directly with the safety director to understand the intended workflow and the validation rules required to support it. the technical work focused on two areas:
1. Correcting business logic and validation
- analysis of existing rules and conditions
- identification of logic conflicts and inconsistent behavior between views
- adaptation of validation rules to match the real operational requirements
- simplification and reorganization for consistent, predictable behavior
2. Optimizing views for large sharepoint lists
No caml, rest, or complex queries were used. instead, I applied targeted optimizations:
- Filtering by indexed columns to avoid exceeding the 5,000 item by view limit.
- Reordering fields to reduce unnecessary lookups.
- Minimizing the amount of data each view needed to load.
- Ensuring users no longer needed to manually adjust elements.
Results
After the adjustments, the client gained:
- A stable and reliable Infopath form aligned with the expected business logic,
- Improved performance when handling large data sources,
- Elimination of validation errors that previously blocked the workflow,
- A smoother and safer experience for a critical operational process.
Conclusion
Even with legacy technologies like Infopath, organizations can achieve reliable and efficient solutions when the design is aligned with real business requirements and optimized for sharepoint constraints.
This project demonstrates that careful adjustments can significantly improve stability, accuracy and user experience.
