SharePoint designer workflow activity: Set content approval status

SharePoint 2007 provides document library with a content approval mechanism, useful for document versioning, approval before publishing content publically. Although lacks in assigning task and sending notifications to approvers. Also defining alerts on the custom views using Approval Status column is not possible here.
The simple alternative was to build a SharePoint Designer workflow. One of the activity needed was to change one of the custom properties and set the Approval status to “Pending” after collection data on completion of task from approver.
And the action activities flow used was
1. Check out current item
2. Set custom properties fields with variables
3. Check in current item with comments
4. Set content approval status to Pending

Although all steps are logically correct, workflow yielded in Error.
After googling for some time, came to forum link providing solution. After adding a delay of 1 minute it started working fine.
New activities flow is
1. Check out current item
2. Set custom properties fields with variables
3. Check in current item with comments
4. Pause for duration 1 minute
5. Set content approval status to Pending

Workaround: Refinement panel stops working when setting Fixed Keyword Query

Recently when working with SharePoint 2010 Search results customization, I experienced weird behavior “Refinement panel stops working when setting Fixed Keyword Query”.
We had customized refinement panel to display custom metadata columns into search results by adding Custom Filters and wanted to display only documents as results. To filter only documents into search result, Fixed keyword Query isDocument:1 and Cross-Web part ID changed to Query2. And refinement panel stopped working.
After playing around with different options, I figured out that, placing static filter IsDocument:1 into Append Text to Query instead of Fixed keyword query option solved the problem.

Checkpoint for using Fixed Keyword Query:
[If you configure a fixed keyword query, you must change the default Cross-Web Part Query ID setting in the Results Query Options node of this Web Part from the default setting of User Query to another query ID on the list, such as Query 2. If you do not change this value, the filter in the Fixed Keyword Query setting is not added to the search query.]
Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg549987.aspx

SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 configuration limitations

It had been a very long time writing any blog. I was very busy with the critical project delivery. Now as have some free time, thought will start blogging again in this New Year. Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!!!

Recently I was working on new project based on SharePoint 2007 and we had used most of the OOTB features to implement a collaboration portal for client. While implementing the solution, I rediscovered (being involved in custom solutions most of the time, we tend to never face these issue) few SharePoint 2007 limitations for OOTB configurations on lists and libraries. And later tried same configurations on SharePoint 2010 and concluded that these limitations do persist with newer version of SharePoint (2010).
Things that are not changed in SharePoint 2010 and have same limitations as SharePoint 2007 are:
1. Cannot define Default value for Lookup columns
2. Cannot define list/library view with Grouped by column of Allow Multiple Selection enabled.
3. Cannot set alerts on the custom view for filtering records based on document approval status column.
4. Calculated column has restriction of nested if count as 6/ 1024 characters whichever encounters first.