SharePoint InfoPath form Allow anonymous users to enter data

SharePoint InfoPath forms is one of the way to enter data into SharePoint. To allow anonymous users to enter the data in the forms we have to follow the steps below,

• Configure Anonymous access to SharePoint site
• Create a list that to submit data anonymously, Change anonymous permissions to the list and update list form to InfoPath form

To configure Anonymous access to Site, navigate to SharePoint central Administration, Navigate to Application management -> Manage Web Applications.

Select the web application, click on “Authentication Providers” in the ribbon. Check “Enable anonymous access” checkbox to Enable Anonymous Access to web application.

To Enable Anonymous access to SharePoint site, Navigate to SharePoint site where we need to allow users enable anonymous access. Open Site Settings, Select Site Permissions. In Ribbon, Permissions Tools section, click on Anonymous access button.

Select Entire Web site option in Anonymous access popup.

Create a List in the site. In List permissions, Break permissions from Parent and Enable Anonymous access to Add items to list.

Customize the InfoPath form by  using Customize List option in the ribbon. 

ViewFormPagesLockDown feature in SharePoint

In General by enabling the anonymous access in SharePoint site, anonymous users will have read-only access to the site. But when we enable anonymous access to SharePoint publishing site, we can have issues with anonymous users in SharePoint site due to ViewFormPagesLockDown feature. This feature will block users to view list view pages. Users can able to access all other web pages. Generally we can face this issue whenever users wanted to comment a blog post as anonymous in SharePoint blog site located in SharePoint publishing site collection.

We can check the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature is active or not by using following Power Shell command.

get-spfeature –site SiteURL

Here SiteURL is URL of the Site to check ViewFormPagesLockDown feature is active. By entering this command we can the list of features that are active in SharePoint site.

By disabling ViewFormPagesLockDown feature we can set anonymous users to access list view pages. to disable that we have to run following PowerShell commands

$lockdownFeature = get-spfeature viewformpageslockdown

disable-spfeature $lockdownFeature SiteURL

here SiteURL is URL of the site to disable ViewFormPagesLockDown feature. By disabling this feature anonymous users can access list view pages as usually.