More than one way

Yes, well.. obviousness aside.. we built a better mousetrap. The whole edit form thingie, well.. was just too much of a PITA. Maintaining nine separate lists of 1000+ entries. History. Approval. Customization. ASPX nightmare although I've gotten myself really familiar with the code and custom forms are a walk in the park. Still no fix for the editform remapping debacle. So I figured, why bother?

Yes, so - build the formatting into the list. It doesn't really care if you use choice fields, radio buttons, whatever. It stores the data exactly the same way. It's still text. Or a number. Or a link, etc. Take off the ability to add new through a custom security group, edit and read only. The whole button disappears. Yayrah. And the piece that they all love? Let them edit in datasheet view. Present in standard, let them modify in datasheet thru actions. The view limits the fields they see. Then, add in versioning, no content approval. Add out of the box approval workflow.. and voila! No more list nightmare.

I still can't wait till they open up the supporting files functionality. Someone from microsoft really needs to address the issue - most of us are ready to cry. I'm just not in the mood to try and learn infopath - I know how to make forms, I've been doing it in asp/aspx for close to five years. My users just want some consistency and the learning curve on this product is pretty broad.