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I just need to go off for a minute. I just got off the phone with a “SharePoint guy” for the leadership for some potential work that I am not going to do. These individuals do not know or understand SharePoint from the fundamental understanding of how they’d like to use it for the enterprise to the understanding of where to click to do simple things. They wanted control so much, they would not give me full control to their site. They told me they’d give me design but then take it back each day when I had no more need for it. The “SharePoint guy” doesn’t know SharePoint or else they’d have him build these libraries. We aren’t even talking hard stuff.
The leadership—these mid-level managers—would have full control. These are the same people who don’t know how to use SharePoint and could really use a class. They have full control and the guy (me) who had designed the permission architecture they agreed to kind of sort of use a few months ago—it took this long for them to agree to implement what they believed was a good design—gets design. I will not have the ability to alter the master so that I could put a disclaimer banner of sorts on each page of the site that regulations mandate they do. The people running their farm haven’t bothered to implement these banners in the last six or so years they had the environment up and running.
</rant>
It really blows my mind. I feel like Beatrice from the Essurance ads. “That isn’t how any of this works!”
So how does this happen? I won’t say it is Microsoft’s fault. That would be an easy cop out that a lot of folks use far too easily. Understanding how to use an expensive platform like SharePoint should fall on the shoulders of the people who decided to purchase it, whether they learn it themselves or trust in the people they decide to hire to manage it. The problem is that few people bothered to question whether or not Team Site Owners, Team Site Members, and Team Site Visitors are the appropriate permission groups a site should have.
Leadership, those with rank and privilege in the organization, own their content. No one should ever question that, but when someone creates a new site and sees an owners group, they automatically assume that the data owners are the Team Site Owners. Now, these individuals who are too busy to take a SharePoint 101 class and probably don’t even have the time to open all of the email in their inboxes are the ones who will get the access requests because they didn’t bother to adequately plan for all of the people who will need to access the site. They will give all of the underlings, including the younger more technically savvy members of the team, only contribute permissions, often by individually granting them permission rather than putting them in the Team Site Members group. Often, I’ll see that they will add everyone outside of the team to the Team Site Members group because Microsoft defaulted the description of the group to say something like, “Use this group to grant people contribute permissions to the SharePoint site: XYX.” Eeekk!!! “Hey, let’s go create another 100 sub sites with new permission groups for each of them and manage them this way so that Bob Smith needs to be added to 100 XYZ Members groups!” Some of these people think this is not just acceptable but encouraged because the site creates these groups with that description automatically.
The data owners—leadership of the organization—should get their own group. That group should be given contribute or read permissions to all of the content they might want, which may or may not be everything on the site. They might not want to see 50 libraries on the site. Maybe they only want to see the links to lists and libraries they give a damn about because they only care about the 30,000-foot view of the data and don’t care about how you make the sausage. That is assuming they are good leaders/executives.
Think about the user experience for yourself as someone who has SCA rights or full control to a site. You get to see every single list and library as links in the quick launch or global navigation or custom menu thing you’ve built. That can be a little overwhelming for most of the users. It is like sitting down in front of the menu at the Cheesecake Factory. They make a wonderful Cuban sandwich if you haven’t tried it yet, but do you know how much other stuff I ate before I found the sandwich I hold so dear? The more things you give them to click on, the longer they will take to make the decision as to what they’d like to click on. We’ve already discussed that the leadership doesn’t have that much free time. Why would you agree to make their lives harder because they want to micromanage what you are building for the workers in the team to enable them to be more efficient in what they do? Push back. They didn’t get where they are because they are stupid, but they are ignorant or ill-informed because of a lack of training and bad SharePoint people. You do them a disservice by not educating them when they demand full control.
That is enough for now. I’m happy to get it off of my chest.