The primary purpose for me to start this blog was to highlight a few of those war stories I’ve got of saving the day. I will leave the names of the clients I’ve had out of this.
So here is a rather recent event. A whole lot of us were on a rather large contract, and the client failed to get paperwork completed on time to keep us on site. We were sent home on mandatory vacation. While on vacation, I learned that there might not be funding for my position after we got back. I spent the time looking for another position. Anyway, three weeks pass and we finally get back to work. A few days later, a guy asks me why he can’t see Title on one of his libraries. After looking at that library for a minute, then others on the same site, then all the way to the Title site column of the whole site collection. Yes, you may have guessed it, Title had been set to hidden and cascaded through the whole site collection.
Now, in a happy world, I’d just run to the farm admin and ask him to restore from a backup, but that wasn’t going to be possible. It happened a week after we left the client’s site. It was another three weeks before I learned of this, so all of the documents that had been edited and pages that had been modified would have been lost if we restored from the last good backup. The only other contractor working on SharePoint with me spent seven days going to every single list and library in the site collection, converted all of them to manage content types, and set Title to required, optional, or hidden as required. I spent only two days on the task before I started to work on my last project before leaving to start with a new company.
Lessons Learned
- Obviously, never screw with the out of the box (OOTB) site columns.
- Don’t let qualified people have full control permissions at the root of a site collection. For the record, I had previously stated the one responsible should not have permissions there, but I’m only a contractor.
- Your farm admin should have a list of daily tasks and weekly tasks. Somewhere among them should include a series of tests to check for changes via the audit log. You can never expect communication to work properly even if you think you have a good change management process in place, so you need to have someone checking these logs often.
- Don’t expect a lot of love from the ones who enabled the person who did this when you fix it. This was a very public airing of dirty laundry. Just do your job and take notes.