Here we go… another Cleverworkarounds waffle!

Now, we all know that Joel Oleson is the Russell Crowe of the SharePoint world! I mean, he’s multi-skilled, loads of talent, has the respect of his peers and has built a well deserved reputation of being one of the best at what he does. (Although unlike Russell I am fairly sure that he has not thrown a telephone at an annoying IT manager in a fit of rage just yet).

But despite his best intentions and with his heart in the right place, Joel is one of the unwitting architects of a butterfly effect that is now plaguing the SharePoint world. One that is now causing much pain and damage to already beleaguered enterprises.

In short, he set the wheels in motion that helped destroy a word via buzzword abuse That word is…

"Governance"

See, way, way back in the bowels of time (okay, around 2006), when the stock market was soaring and therefore SOX compliance was being conveniently ignored by investors in equities, Joel’s blog was one of a couple of blogs of any significance SharePoint-wise. He was out there doing his bit for the common good, stressing the importance of governance in the SharePoint world before the word governance was really used in this context. Joel cited this article by Matthew Cain at Gartner which seems to be the root of it all. Now this is perfectly fine and dandy, but Joel made one fatal mistake that we are still feeling the effects of…

He de-nerdified his blog and made this stuff accessible! Thus, somewhere in the world, a marketing person read it and understood just enough syllables to get a gist of what Joel was talking about. Sensing the opportunity to add a new word to glossy brochureware, from that moment forward the true meaning of "governance" was lost forever as the snowball effect of a new buzzword taking root gained momentum. As the snowball rolls faster, more and more vendors get onto the bandwagon, each skewing the definition to suit their own ends.

So now, I am afraid that governance is now irreversibly sliding down the same slippery slope as such luminaries as "convergence", "portal", "ubiquitous", "social networking" and the current cream of the crop – "web 2.0".

…and it’s all Joel’s fault, right?

So, how to reclaim this word? I don’t know if you can. I have, however, decided to start a social experiment making my own future buzzword. More on that in a minute.

Governance = systems thinking

Before I present my version of what governance really means, I want to enlighten you to an important philosophical concept that underpins governance called "systems thinking" or "the systems approach". Systems thinking approaches problem solving from the perspective that the problem must be looked at as parts of an overall system, rather than focusing on individual outcomes. Wikipedia has quite a nice quote which captures the philosophy nicely.

Systems thinking attempts to illustrate that events are separated by distance and time and that small catalytic events can cause large changes in complex systems. Acknowledging that an improvement in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system, it promotes organizational communication at all levels in order to avoid the silo effect.

Either I have been officially typecast, or many organisations are feeling the same pain. The reason I say this is because I’ve been called in to assist organisations that are suffering a crisis of confidence with the SharePoint platform. In each case there are one or more highly visible and persistent problems that are causing user dissatisfaction. That translates to a stressed and under-confident SharePoint/IT project team who are questioning the validity of the SharePoint platform.

My brief in each was to help them pinpoint the root cause of their immediate pain, but in the context of a more holistic review of the SharePoint service to try and identify the gaps that allowed the situation to arise in the first place. The interesting fact about these sites is that they did have governance plans and on the surface of it all, most of the boxes could be ticked.

So, what went wrong?

It all boiled down to this: Stakeholders had a different interpretation of what governance actually means – the curse of a buzzword!. Most stakeholders in fact were more interested in the fact that they had a thirty page document someone wrote with "Governance plan" in the title and thought "okay that’s done, what’s next?".

This is not a systems thinking approach and therefore, this is not good governance. In fact, it really has missed the point entirely.

"SharePoint Assurance" is the new buzzword  

At the end of the day, there are two immutable facts of working life.

1. We are all accountable to someone. Whether it is the board of directors being accountable to shareholders or the guy on the helpdesk being accountable to his operational manager, the vast majority of us are tasked with various responsibilities that our performance is judged on. If we fail to perform to the expectations, we not only let ourselves down, but we can adversely affect others.

2. We all want to go home from work, secure in the knowledge that we performed what was expected of us and we are still going to have a job tomorrow.

Both of these facts underpin the principle that we are all cogs in a complex organisational machine where our individual (and organisation-wide) fate is reliant on each other in complex, often implicit interdependencies.

Governance therefore is all about providing assurance. If you do not provide assurance, you will have fear, uncertainty and doubt. Take a look at the stock markets crashing around the world. Clearly assurance is in extremely short supply!

A Social Experiment

Now what I want to do twofold. For some strange reason I see the funny side of creating a new buzzword and see how long it takes to get to a brochure. Thus I am officially raising a virtual flag and laying claim to being the first person to use the term "SharePoint assurance" instead of SharePoint governance. (at the time of a writing a google search on this phrase yields only 5 hits).

Once you see the term in a marketing brochure, please let me know

But on a more serious note, I think that assurance in the SharePoint space can be done a lot better than it is and I have a few ideas on how this can be achieved.

More (hopefully much more) on this topic area soon…

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

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I think as you age, you become more and more like your parents. Not so long ago I went out paintballing with some friends and we all agreed that the 16-18 year olds who also happened to be there were all obnoxious little twerps who needed a good kick in the rear. At the same time, we also agreed that we were just as obnoxious back when we were that age. Your perspective changes as you learn and your experience grows, but you don’t forget where you came from.

I now find myself saying stuff to my kids that my parents said to me, I think today’s music is crap, I have taken a liking to drinking quality scotch. Essentially all I need now to complete the metamorphosis to being my father is for all my hair to fall out!

So when I write an article whining about an assertion that IT has a credibility issue and has gone backwards in its ability to cope with various challenges, I fear that I have now officially become my parents. I’ll sound like grandpa who always tells you that life was so much simpler back in the 1940’s.

Consequences of complexity…

Before I go and dump on IT as a discipline, how about we dump on finance as a discipline, just so you can be assured that my cynicism extends far beyond nerds.

I previously wrote about how Sarbanes Oxley legislation was designed to, yet ultimately failed to, provide assurance to investors and regulators that public companies had adequate controls over their financial risk. As I write this, we are in the midst of a once in a generation-or-two credit crisis where some seven hundred billion dollars ($700,000,000,000) of US taxpayers’ money will be used to take ownership of crap assets (foreclosed or unpaid mortgages).

Part of the problem with the credit crisis was through the use of "collateralized debt obligations". This is a fancy, yet complex, way of taking a bunch of mortgages, and turning them into an "asset" that someone else who has some spare cash invests in. If you are wondering why the hell someone would invest in such a thing, then consider people with home loans, supposedly happily paying interest on those mortgages. It is that interest that finds its way to the holder (investor) of the CDO. So a CDO is supposedly an income stream.

Now if that explanation makes your eyes glaze over then I have bad news for you: that’s supposed to be the easy part. The reality is that the CDO’s are actually extremely complex things. They can be backed by residential property, commercial property, something called mortgage backed securities, corporate loans – essentially anything that someone is paying interest on can find its way into a CDO that someone else buys into, to get the income stream from the interest paid.

To provide "assurance" that these CDO’s are "safe", ratings agencies give them a mark that investors rely upon when making their investment. So a "AAA" CDO is supposed to have been given the tick of approval by experts in debt instrument style finance.

Here’s the rub about rating agencies. Below is a news article from earlier in the year with some great quotes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/business/23how.html?pagewanted=print

Credit rating agencies, paid by banks to grade some of the new products, slapped high ratings on many of them, despite having only a loose familiarity with the quality of the assets behind these instruments.

Even the people running Wall Street firms didn’t really understand what they were buying and selling, says Byron Wien, a 40-year veteran of the stock market who is now the chief investment strategist of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund. “These are ordinary folks who know a spreadsheet, but they are not steeped in the sophistication of these kind of models,” Mr. Wien says. “You put a lot of equations in front of them with little Greek letters on their sides, and they won’t know what they’re looking at.”

Mr. Blinder, the former Fed vice chairman, holds a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. but says he has only a “modest understanding” of complex derivatives. “I know the basic understanding of how they work,” he said, “but if you presented me with one and asked me to put a market value on it, I’d be guessing.”

What do we see here? How many people really *understand* what’s going on underneath the complexity?

Of course, we now know that many of the mortgages backing these CDO’s were made to people with poor credit history, or with a high risk of not being able to pay the loans back. Jack up the interest rate or the cost of living and people foreclose or do not pay the mortgage. When that happens en masse, we have a glut of houses for sale, forcing down prices, lowering the value of the assets, eliminating the "income stream" that CDO investors relied upon, making them pretty much worthless.

My point is that the complexity of the CDO’s were such that even a guy with a doctorate in economics only had a ‘modest understanding’ of them. Holy crap! If he doesn’t understand it then who the hell does?

Thus, the current financial crisis is a great case study in the relationship between complexity and risk.

Consequences of complexity (IT version)…

One thing about doing what I do, is that you spent a lot of time on-site. You get to see the IT infrastructure  and development at many levels. But more importantly, you also spend a lot of time talking to IT staff and organisation stakeholders with a very wide range of skills and experience. Finally and most important of all, you get to see first hand organisational maturity at work.

My conclusion? IT is completely f$%#ed up across all disciplines and many will have their own mini equivalent of the US $700 billion dollar haemorrhage. Not only that, it is far worse today than it previously was – and getting worse! IT staff are struggling with ever accelerating complexity and the "disconnect" between IT and the business is getting worse as well. To many businesses, the IT department has a credibility problem, but to IT the feeling is completely mutual

You can find a nice thread about this topic on slashdot. My personal favourite quote from that thread is this one

Let me just say, after 26 years in this business, of hearing this every year, the systems just keep getting more complex and harder to maintain, rather than less and easier.

Windows NT was supposed to make it so anyone who could use Windows could manage a server.

How many MILLION MSCEs do we have in the world now?

Storage systems with Petabytes of data are complex things. Cloud computing is a complex thing. Supercomputing clusters are complex things. World-spanning networks are complex things.

No offense intended, but the only people who think things are getting easier are people who don’t know how they work in the first place

Also there is this…

There are more software tools, programming languages, databases, report writers, operating systems, networking protocols, etc than ever before. And all these tools have a lot more features than they used to. It’s getting increasingly harder to know "some" of them well. Gone are the days when just knowing DOS, UNIX, MVS, VMS, and OS/400 would basically give you knowledge of 90% of the hardware running. Or knowing just Assembly/C/Cobol/C++ would allow you to read and maintain most of the source code being used. So I would argue that the need for IT staff is going to continue to increase.

I think the "disconnect" between IT and Business has a lot more to do with the fact that business "knows" they depend on IT, but they are frustrated that IT can’t seem to deliver what they want when they want it. On the other side, IT has to deal with more and more tools and IT staff has to learn more and more skills. And to increase frustration in IT, business users frequently don’t deliver clear requirements or they "change" their mind in the middle of projects….

So it seems that I am not alone

I mentioned previously that more often than not, SQL Server is poorly maintained – I see it all the time. Yet today I was speaking to a colleague who is a storage (SAN) and VMware virtualisation god. I asked him what the average VMware setup was like and his answer was similar to my SQL Server and SharePoint experience. In his experience, most of them were sub-optimally configured, poorly maintained, poorly documented and he could not provide any assurance as to the stability of the platform.

These sorts of quality assurance issues are rampant in application development too. I see the same thing most definitely in the security realm too.

As the above quote sates, "it’s increasingly harder to know *some* of them well". These days I am working with specialists who live and breathe their particular discipline (such as storage, virtualisation, security or comms). Those disciplines over time grow more complex and sub-disciplines appear.

Pity then, the poor developer/sysadmin/IT manager who is trying to keep a handle on all of this and try to provide a decent service to their organisation!

Okay, so what? IT has always been complex – I sound like a Gartner cliche. What’s this got to do with SharePoint?

Consequences of SharePoint complexity…

SharePoint, for a number of reasons, is one of those products that has a way of really laying bare any gaps that the organisation has in terms of their overall maturity around technology and strategy.

Why?

Because it is so freakin’ complex! That complexity transcends IT disciplines and goes right to the heart organisational/people issues as well.

It’s bad enough getting nerds to agree on something, let alone organisation-wide stakeholders!

Put simply, if you do a half-arsed job of putting SharePoint in, you will be punished in so many ways! The simple fact is that the odds are against you before you even start because it only takes a mistake in one particular part of the complex layers of hardware, systems, training, methodology, information architecture and governance, to devalue the whole project.

When I first started out, I was helping organizations get SharePoint installed. However lately I am visiting a lot of sites where SharePoint has already been installed, but it has not been a success. There are various reasons;I have cited them in detail in the project failure series, so I won’t rehash all that here. (I’d suggest reading parts three, four and five in particular).

I am firmly of the conclusion that much of SharePoint is more art than science, and what’s more, the organisation has to be ready to come with you. Due to differing learning styles and poor communication of strategy, this is actually pretty rare. Unfortunately, IT are not the people who are well suited to "getting the organisation ready for SharePoint."

If that wasn’t enough, then there is this question. If IT already struggle to manage the underlying infrastructure and systems that underpin SharePoint, then how can you have any assurance that IT will have a "governance epiphany" and start doing things the right way?

This translates to risk, people! I will be writing all about risk in a similar style to the CFO Return on Investment series very soon. I am very interested in methods to quantify the risk brought about by the complexity of SharePoint and the IT services it relies on. For me, I see a massive parallel from the complexity factor in the current financial crisis and I think that a lot can be learned from it. SOX was supposed to provide assurance and yet did nothing to prevent the current crisis. Therefore, SOX represents a great example of mis-focused governance where a lot of effort can be put in for no tangible gain.

A quick test of "assurance"…

Governance is like learning to play the guitar. It takes practice, and it does not give up its secrets easily and despite good intent, you will be crap at it for a while. It is easy to talk about, but putting it into practice is another thing.

Just remember this. The whole point of the exercise is to provide *assurance* to stakeholders. When you set any rule, policy, procedure, standard (or similar), just ask yourself: Does this provide me the assurance I need that gives me confidence to vouch for the service I am providing? Just because you may be adopting ITIL principles, does *not* mean that you are necessarily providing the right sort assurance that is required.

I’ll leave you with a somewhat biased, yet relatively easy litmus test that you can use to test your current level of assurance.

It might be simplistic, but if you are currently scared to apply a service pack to SharePoint, then you might have an assurance issue.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

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Microsoft bashing is a favourite pastime of many a nerd. Whether it is justified or not in many cases is debatable since M$ will never please everyone. But the point is, it is cathartic and in actual fact, good therapy because venting your frustrations at Bill Gates is much healthier than at your colleagues or family.

To my Microsoft employee friends reading this. Don’t feel all defensive – some of the very best Microsoft bashing I have ever heard comes from you guys anyway

So although sometimes the M$ bashing is completely unjustified, long shall it continue to preserve the sanity of IT professionals around the globe.

Having said that, on occasion you will hit some Microsoft induced pain that is legitimately and frustratingly dumb. By "legitimately", I mean that you cannot say "although in hindsight it was dumb, I can actually understand why they decided to do that". Instead you get caught out and experience pain and frustration simply because of a silly Microsoft oversight.

In this case, the oversight is with the SharePoint Configuration Wizard

Continue reading “Sometimes "Microsoft bashing" is justified”

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Bill, a former colleague of mine who is very technically savvy, has a little corner of the blogspace called www.notgoodenough.net.

Here he posts about the everyday dumb issues that he comes across that make his working life that little bit harder. By day, he manages some very complex infrastructure for a company of over 1000 staff, and we often catch up for a coffee to compare notes on the latest head-shaking piece of dumbness that we have recently encountered. Now doing "not good enough" stories for Microsoft is simply too easy, so that’s why I like the fact that Bill goes after the likes of IBM and Packeteer as well

The thing that is really scary when you read his stories, is the sheer unbridled freakin *lameness* of some of the things that he has encountered. My own stores are very similar, and it reinforces to me that usually when something goes pear shaped enough to cost time and money, the underlying cause is rarely clever.

Continue reading “Not Good Enough Stories…”

Technorati Tags: Risk, Security, Troubleshooting

Here is a recent little story about when, in the name of "security", a really dumb thing was done, and the response that said a lot about the security posture of those behind the response.

A client of mine has 4 servers (2 for an Active Directory domain, and two for SharePoint/SQL server) hosted with an external provider. I was commissioned to perform a fairly standard install of MOSS 2007 enterprise.

My former life in security still influences me to this day, and thus I always build SharePoint in a fairly locked down fashion. So, apart from some strict naming conventions among components, I used a bunch of user accounts to run the various SharePoint services. I made sure that none of which have any privileges over and above what they absolutely require for SharePoint to work.

The install was fairly flawless and was over in a couple of hours, however my client called me half a day later to let me know that search was broken.

Continue reading “All in the name of "security"…”

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Those in the security community who have ever performed vulnerability assessment/penetration testing will know of the Google Hacking database. Google is actually a very handy tool to look for potentially vulnerable sites, due to the fact that it will crawl anything it finds. Therefore, if you have misconfigured an externally facing web-based application, at some point the crawler will come along and your misconfiguration will end up in Google’s giant cache.

Extending this risk to SharePoint is not such a stretch. For example, type the following into a Google search…

"view all site content" "sign in" "people and groups"

What do you see?

Scary, huh?

Now to be fair, I have to make some points here.

• Many of these sites are legitimately meant to be accessible to the public
• I am not disclosing a SharePoint vulnerability, or any issue with the security of the product. Hence why this is not posted to say, bugtraq and I am not making a big deal of it beyond this post.
• SharePoint is secure by default in the sense that privileged operations are protected by granular access permissions and anonymous access must be explicitly granted.
• It is extremely unlikely that you will be able to change anything – as this is read-only anonymous access explicitly granted by the SharePoint administrator. Areas of the site not marked anonymous (e.g site settings) should be safe from modification
• If there is an error here, then it is human error around configuration of the product.

But as a "bad guy", when you decide to target an organisation, you go through a phase of gathering as much information as possible. Some of these sites expose domain names, user account names and other personal details. Such information can be used to gather additional information. For example, knowing a person’s name, I could set up a fake email address, myspace or facebook account in that person’s name and target their colleagues using social engineering techniques. Using anonymity tools like tor in combination with say, WGET, you could sponge all of the data and documents on such sites for offline analysis.

Documents left inside public document libraries expose internal system names, acronyms and details that paint a fuller picture of the internal organisational set-up. Such information can be used for bogus telephone surveys for the purpose of obtaining more information, targeted Trojans disguised as patches, etc. On occasion, particularly sensitive information can be found within these publicly accessible lists and libraries. (Consider the risk if a data connection library or client list was contained in a site like this).

Additionally, when I see domain names, it gives me a pretty good idea of the topology of the SharePoint infrastructure also. Why? Well, for example, if I see domain names, then people are signing in using their domain accounts. Therefore, the SharePoint server has to be part of the Active Directory and is very likely residing on their internal network and published to the Internet via ISA or some other reverse proxy or port forwarding technique.

All in all, it should be a wake up call to SharePoint administrators about the risks of information disclosure when setting up public-facing SharePoint sites.

Google does not forgive (or forget).

Thanks

Paul Culmsee

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As I mentioned in my last post, I always security trim SharePoint. A very common issue with a security trimmed SharePoint is the "access denied" message that you receive when trying to activate the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure" site collection feature.

There are lots of blog topics about this. Most refer to this one as the definitive source.

Activating Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure

The issue here is that the publishing feature actually breaks a security rule. When you think about it, activating a site collection feature should only ever modify settings related to that site collection. I previously blogged about how it was bad practice for a site collection feature to modify the web.config files for a given web application.

If you set the scope of this feature at the site collection level, you are basically allowing a site collection administrator to make a change that affects all other site collections in the web application. Uh – does the site collection administrator have access to other site collections? Probably not, so why the hell would you allow them to perform a task that impacts on site collections to which they have no access? You don’t – it breaks the security model.

Well, as it happens, the publishing feature needs to create some SharePoint timer jobs to deal with the scheduling of publishing pages (i.e. Setting the date/time of when a page should be published to the masses). But where are timer jobs edited and managed?

Site Collection Administration! This is a *farm* level operation. Should a site collection administrator have the access rights to add custom timer jobs to the SharePoint farm? Hell, no! that is a farm administrator’s job!

So, is it no surprise then, that the publishing feature barfs when activated by a site collection administrator who has no *farm* level access? (I’ve pasted the error message to the end of this article).

I could whine about how this *should* be done, but instead, I’ll simply tell you the two quickest tricks to fix this issue. Both of these methods do not require changing permissions as per the aforementioned blog.

The first method, is to use STSADM to activate the feature for the site collection. By definition, to use the STSADM command, you have to be logged into the SharePoint server and be a farm administrator. Therefore, running the following command should do the trick.

stsadm -o activatefeature -name PublishingSite -url http://sitecollectionurl

The second method is the one that I use (although it’s less clean). As per normal, I create a web application, and then create a site collection. (Usually the blank template for reasons that I will talk about some other time). But rather than log into the site and activate the publishing feature via site settings, I immediately create a *second*  site collection (e.g /sites/boo).

Remember that I am performing this task via SharePoint central administration, so I have farm level permissions.

When I create this second site collection, I choose the publishing site template. As the name suggests, the publishing site template uses the publishing site feature by default. So in creating this site collection, the SharePoint timer jobs get added to the farm.

I then immediately *delete* this site collection, as it is no longer needed.

Now I can load the originally created site collection and activate the publishing feature. It will work fine, because the timer jobs have already been created, and all of the other goodies that the publishing feature gives you, are scoped at the *site collection* level. Therefore, no more "access denied" messages.

Regards

Paul Culmsee

www.cleverworkarounds.com

Error message: (stop reading now – this is for google

"Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘PublishingResources’ (ID: ‘aebc918d-b20f-4a11-a1db-9ed84d79c87e’).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to provision the scheduling job definitions.  Page scheduling will not succeed. OriginalException: Access denied. —> System.Security.SecurityException: Access denied.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWorkItemJobDefinition.Update()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.RootProvisioner.<>c__DisplayClass5.<AddSchedulingJobDefinitions>b__4()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevatedWrapper

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I guess the entire SharePoint world now is aware of the post SP1 "Infrastructure updates" put out by Microsoft recently. Probably the best thing about them are that the flaky "content deployment" feature has had some serious work done on it. (My advice has always been use with extreme caution or avoid it, but now I will have to reassess).

Anyway, that is not what I am writing about. Being a former IT Security consultant, I have always installed SharePoint in a "least privilege" configuration. I use different service accounts for search, farm, SSP, reporting services and web applications. The farm account in particular, is one that needs to be very carefully managed given its control over the heart of SharePoint – the configuration database.

Specifically, the farm account never should have any significant rights on any SharePoint farm server, over and above what it minimally needs (which is some SQL Server rights and some DCOM permission stuff). For what it’s worth, I do not use the Network Service account either, as it is actually more risky than a low privileged domain or local user account.

Developers on the other hand tend to run their boxes as full admin. I have no problem with this, so long as there is a QA or test server that is running least privilege.

However, as always with tightening the screws, there are some potential side effects in doing this. There are occasions when the farm account actually needs to perform a task that requires higher privileges, over and above what it has by default. Upgrading SharePoint from a standard to enterprise license is one such example, and it seems that performing the infrastructure update may be another.

If you take the time to read the installation instructions for the infrastructure update, there is this gem of advice:

To ensure that you have the correct permissions to install the software update and run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, we recommend that you add the account for the SharePoint Central Administration v3 application pool identity to the Administrators group on each of the local Web servers and application servers and then log on by using that account

You may wonder why this even matters? After all, it is exceedingly likely that you logged into the server as an administrator or domain administrator anyway. Surely you have all the permission that you need, right?

The answer is that not all update tasks are run by your logged-in account. Although you start the installation using your account, at a certain point during the install, many tasks are performed by the SharePoint Central Administration application. Thus, despite you having administrative permissions, SharePoint (using the farm account) will not have.

So the advice above essentially says, temporarily add the SharePoint farm account to the local administrators group and then log into the server as that user account. Now perform the action as instructed. That way the account that starts the installation is the same account that runs SharePoint and thus we know that we are using the correct account with the correct server privileges.

Once the installation has been completed, you can log out of the farm account and then revoke its administrator access, and we are back to the original locked down configuration.

So keep this in mind when performing farm tasks that are likely to require some privileges at the operating system level. It is a good habit to get into (provided you remember to lock down permissions afterwards ).

Cheers

Paul

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Hi again and welcome to part 6 of my series on the factors of why SharePoint projects fail. Joel Oleson’s write-up a while back gave me 5 minutes of fame, but like any contestant on Big Brother, I’ve had my time in the limelight, been voted out of the house (as in Joel’s front page) and I’m back to being an ordinary citizen again.

If you have followed events thus far, I covered off some wicked problem theory, before delving into the bigger ticket items that contribute to SharePoint project failure. In the last post, we pointed our virtual microscope at the infrastructure aspects that can cause a SharePoint problem to go off the rails.

Now we turn our magnifying glass onto application development issues and therefore application developers. Ah, what fun you can have with application developer stereotyping, eh! A strange breed indeed they are. As a group they have had a significant contribution to the bitter and twisted individual that I am today.

The CleverWorkarounds tequila shot rating is back!

for a project manager in denial

for the rest of us!

Continue reading “Why do SharePoint Projects Fail – Part 6″

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Hi again and welcome to this seemingly endless series of posts on the topic of SharePoint projects gone bad.

We spent a couple of posts looking at problem projects in general before focusing specifically on SharePoint. If you have followed the series closely, you will observe that haven’t talked much on technical aspects of the product yet. If you were expecting me to pick apart annoying aspects of the architecture then unfortunately, you will be disappointed because I really don’t believe that it is a big factor in why SharePoint projects fail. Besides which, 90% of SharePoint blogs are on technical/development content anyway.

So where am I going with part 5 then you ask?  I am indeed delving into technical aspects, but once again it is all about the people involved.

So now its time to take a few cheap-shots at the geeks. (After all, they are sensitive souls and we don’t want them to feel left out do we). For the purposes of this post, infrastructure people, tech support, system administrators can be lumped into the same ‘geek bucket’.

Geeks can also cop it like Project Managers do, when projects take on wicked tendencies. They will implement the agreed requirements, but the stakeholders feel that the end result isn’t what they wanted. In the ensuing fallout that happens when the project sponsor realises that say, half a million bucks has been blown with little to show for it, blame is inevitably directed their way, whether justified or not.

Continue reading “Why do SharePoint Projects Fail – Part 5″

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