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Over the past 2 days there has been a repeated question over on Stump the Panel about having a choice column that will auto update with values users manually enter. Out of the box there isn’t anything that can be done to update the values of the choice column to include the specified value.

Eric Alexander is a contributing author at EndUserSharePoint.com as well as a moderator on Stump the Panel. We were going to post his article on the work he has done with the Employee Training Template, but have decided to point directly to his site so that you can get the latest updates as he continues to tweak the templates.

I thought of another solution using Information Policy Settings and a work flow on the list. The idea for this came from a screencast I saw somewhere that used document expiration policies to serve as a publishing mechanism for Announcements. I thought information management could be a good candidate to solve this problem. After some testing, it will work but there are some caveats to this solution:

With him being a novice to Sharepoint, I was able to really relay best practice decisions. Other more experienced Sharepoint users aren’t as open to these ideas in the collections they have built up. He appreciated and respected the guidelines I was offering. Not once did I mention the term metadata when referring to this column. That probably would have derailed the train and lost my user. Instead, I just stated this column will store information particular to the file being uploaded. The reality is that this bit of information is acting in the same way a folder does, without the physical structure that he was used to. He was a bit confused with this at first, but it became real clear, real fast when we uploaded 2 files with different metadata tags and they were grouped nicely.

Recently a question was asked in Stump the Panel if content could be filtered on a Sharepoint site based on IP address. This is very doable with Sharepoint Designer and the data view web part coupled with a little custom coding. This article will describe the process of filtering a Sharepoint list based on IP address. The principles displayed can be adopted for various requirements.