BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation Official BOFH logo (red rotary telephone with devil's tal and devil's horns) BOFH logo EPISODE 17 The new Boss is keen to acquire knowledge. So keen that he wants a quick rundown on our content management system so he can avail himself of our copious workplace documentation. "WELL," I say, bracing myself for a long session, " …
Definitely never mention those words near anyone that works in IT or with computers at all. It's akin to saying "Macbeth" to superstitious actors.
I have never encountered a problem that was fixed by adding SharePoint or Teams into the equation.
Remember when you used to get back from work after a holiday (Americans look this word up in a dictionary) and there were 100s or even 1000s of emails to delete read?
All you needed to do was go through them with the down key replying every so often. Now with T***s it takes way longer to go through all the messages in a zillion different places. If you're really lucky you even get two notifications about the same message...
I have a simple answer - they've been told that messages on Teams or WhatsApp will not be responded to (it eve says so in my out-of-office message).
They're useful tools, up to a point, for quick conversations when working remotely, and that's it. I've even had users asking us to recover a year old message from WhatsApp - I pointed out that if it's not on their device, tough, we don't have any central control or access.
As an American, I think you struck off the wrong word.
The way I catch up is to start by deleting every email that contains "i need", "can you", "can we", "problem", "outage", "error", or "log" because they should have been tickets. Next I delete every email sent to more than one recipient because its not my problem, yet, if they haven't received an answer. Next I delete every email that contains an unsubscribe link. If there are any remaining, I select them all and delete them. If it turns out one of them was important, I'm assured to get a reminder. Finally, I empty the trash to insure that they're actually gone.
One thing I have learned is that doing an initial search for 'gift card' can save you from deleting your yearly bonus. I won't make that mistake again.
> The way I catch up is to start by deleting every email
We had a director who said that any email where he is either cc'd or bcc'd gets automatically deleted as if was not actually addressed *to* him then it was not his problem.
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To be honest, this story could quite probably actually have been describing Sh***Point (insert your preferred choices of letters - I certainly know which mine are). It really is truly dreadful: as well as being mostly unnavigable, it takes forever to load a page (via a bazillion different servers), prioritises Word-like formatting idiocy over structural meaning, requires an enormous browser window for its huge sprawling clunky editor, need I go on…?
I wouldn't be surprised if the Sh***Point developers were busily taking notes from this story for new misfeatures to add…
I sort of hate to say it, but I don't entirely dislike the T-thing (posting anon for obvious reasons!). It can be useful for quick chats in reasonably small teams, and is often better than huge email threads where not everyone has read (or bothered to read) all the emails (or different people have been added and removed) and the whole thing quickly becomes an incomprehensible jumble.
Slack is rather better, though, but it's really not great that either of them basically mean that all your "internal" conversations are getting slurped up by dodgy US companies <sigh>. It's a real shame that none of the open-source locally-hostable alternatives seem to have gained much momentum (and, from what I've heard, some of them are equally, if not more, gnarly, from a hosting and maintaining perspective).
Slack is shit. Originally, it was shit with a full debug symbol table. They continue to add features (at least they call them features) that only an idiot would use. For example, the latest fuckwittery changed the status scheduler so that what last week would have marked me unavailable for 6 hours, today marks me busy for 30 hours. They must have hired some Microsoft rejects because their most annoying 'features' don't have corresponding config options to disable them. Also, the advertising preferences for URLs are based on the sender's settings, not the recipient's settings. This means that when I disabled the 'tell me about the URL in the slack message' it only disables the garbage for messages that I create, and ignores the setting in messages to me. Also, their state machine that keeps track of which messages you've read is flaky as hell. You can read a message four times and it will mark it unread a fifth time.
/rant
I could go on, but now I'm pissed off. Oh, and believe it or not, it has gotten worse since it was purchased by Salesforce.
T-thing is useful for some things, especially virtual meetings. Doc sharing/editing and chat are ok.
The initial rollout was very painful, then it slightly improved... and now it's getting worse and worse. Because they are trying to make it do everything. How do they fix the problem that everyone now has 1000 different 'channels'? Make it easier to organize them? No, of course not. Start using Viva Engage, an enterprise social networking app inside Microsoft 365. (I am not kidding)
Hate (but have to) use Powerpoint, Excel, and Outlook? Let's make it worse by letting you use crippled versions of those in your browser. Like to optimize screen space? Too bad, everthing is now in 18 pt font with lots of whitespace so only 3 things fit on your screen.
And don't forget to use AI, everyone can now create agents to make your life easier. And if you are lucky enough to get a full license, you can just burn money by doing the dumbest things with copilot. (my favorite canned prompt on the M365 copilot page is "ask me what's next on your calendar".
No, it very much still is named Yammer, for the exact same reason the Birds-Aren't-Real App's true name is still Twitter. ...Actually, as a Home Depot employee, I still remember its first incarnation: THD Warehouse, back when it was trying to specifically be an in-house Facebook clone, before evolving into HDX-Brand LinkedIn and being sold to the actual owners of LinkedIn...
Dumber than doing the dumbest thing in copilot is manglement deciding that everyone's objectives increase by thirty percent (because AI shit) and on top you get an additional objective for using so-called AI. I wish I was kidding.
But I do have an agent that could make my life easier: it's the old trusty, rusty 9mm agent. Deploying it... on the computer would improve my life, at least in the short term.
Oh, I've seen loads of dumb things with Copilot. Where I work, they like to share the "top prompt of the week" that people can submit. One peach last month was a big, long-winded prompt for arranging a meeting with a certain title and agenda at a time everyone is free. Obviously this came from someone who has never used the scheduler function that has existed in Outlook for years.
Plus of course it takes way longer to type that big, long prompt, and then provide each participant's full e-mail address than just clicking a button in Outlook and only having to type a few letters of each person's name to add them in....
T-Thing is probably the worst chat program out there and it's precisely because it's basically a frontend for S****point.
Google did all the hard work to make RTC work in browsers (which is what most clients are), the rest is really just branding.
I have never encountered a problem that was fixed by adding...
I have. And the problem was that we had file servers, logical folder structures, and naming conventions that everyone easily understood. That problem was thoroughly remedied with tagging files and losing them in channels and a search such-a-tool tool that will refuse to present you the file you're looking for even if you know (and type) exactly how it's named. Oh, and we also solved the problem of logically assigned access rights (based on groups) and have bettered it with individual permissions administered in obscure paths in "teams" or "channels" or something.
Trying to find the one useful page that lists all the error codes you get on a large IT providers system on said providers documentation site website. I would have expected Simon to have an interface between their CMS and the building management system so that the overrides on window locks can be activated.
You mentioned the c word (confluence) a place where you can never find the document last worked on. The search only produces some interesting results - interesting in that they aren’t anything to with what you were looking for.
We have one of these at work and really we need to clean it up but nobody is willing to take the job on (I wonder why)
Google, with their brightly-coloured, variably-useful, and often randomly jettisoned to the graveyard [1], products, are probably also a very good match for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
I very often do wish that they would "Go stick [their] head in a pig".
[1] Why whoever set up the site did not make the domain name Google Graveyard, is beyond me…
Writing is one of those things that (almost) everyone can do, but not so many people can do well. There is a real art to writing and managing good technical or other business documentation, and not everyone can do it. A sensible and organised (and easily navigable) hierarchical structure (and a CMS that is not so brittle as to make it hard to modify when needed), good navigation (updated by the CMS itself - you shouldn't need to have to add things to "menu" pages by hand), meaningful and suitably descriptive document titles (and section titles), meaningful user-definable searchable document tags (if the CMS doesn't support tags, that's a problem in itself).
And never create a new section/document called "New Thing Project", give it a version number or even just a year or something (a year can be a perfectly adequate version number, assuming you're not churning out new iterations super-frequently) so that you can uniquely identify it, otherwise you'll be searching for documentation about "Thing Project" in the future and have no idea which of the found pages refer to the original "Thing Project", which are "New Thing Project" and which are "Even Newer Thing Project" (which someone will have also named "New Thing Project", because it's the current new Thing, them having forgotten that there were also previous "new"Things…
"A sensible and organised (and easily navigable) hierarchical structure"
This is apt to come into the "no plan survives contact with reality" category when one branch of the hierarchy proliferates so much that everything else is miniscule in comparison and you realise the real root should have been some node about a third of the way down it.
Upvoted. Librarianship 101, or the correct principles for an office filing system which brought myriads of companies successfully through generations of business and progress. The oldest of those companies have curated archives that you can still find documents in. Good luck with that in a hundred years for any of the software solutions kicking around now.
The nightmare began when we stopped filing things in carefully chosen places, or alternatively carefully indexing things placed in a managed store. Some clown thought that having a list of all the words in all the documents would make it easy to find what one was looking for. Repeat after me: the set of words in a document does not tell you what the document is about. cf Manila and manila!
Confluence was, before their AI agent "Rovo", the nearest approximation to a black hole in Earth.
Now, with Rovo, it will spew out all the garbage that it can find.
It's not a curated document repository with strict controls on what gets added and retained.
Garbage in, garbage out
I must say the "people unencumbered by the intellectual weights of reliability, safe data management, and backupability" were instantly recognizable, and would be exactly the types to fall for ideas like using "AI to create tags and keywords dynamically". The nightly updates are a brilliant touch, and are indeed the nightmare anyone encumbered by the aforementioned intellectual weights predict it to be.
> people unencumbered by the intellectual weights
Would cover the whole territory from middle manglement through the C suite to the board.
Curiously "backupability" already appears in Wiktionary with the expected meaning.
The word doesn't really have an exact synonym as it entails a number of properties from the ability to capture a consistent, single point in time image (snapability?) to the ability to restore a usable functional image. Even archivability ≠ backupability.
CMS — Content Mostly Shit, Crap Manglement Software, Completely Maims Sanity…
At least with separate mostly text files typically dispersed randomly over a shared drive, you have a fighting chance with grep (and find.) :)
Inverted indices were once used for this kind of stuff (no AI needed nor arguably any I) but I don't recall any specific Unix/Linux tools to build them. (DWB?)
I have spent the last two years building a business case for ditching the S-word in favour of a functional DMS.
At last I understand why manglement mandated the dominant virtual shredder and refuse to budge.
However they also have an S1000D tickbox, which I refuse to tick because I have a two-year dodgy dossier on why ShitePoint is not fit for purpose.
H'mm. Exposure or black marks for failing to deliver. But then, senior manager are supposed to be good at the difficult ones, right?
In my current place of enforced s and t, users will add version numbers and initials of who last worked on a file to file names on sharepoint, a sure fire way to make sure you are using the latest out of date file you were sent a link to last week.
If only sharepoint had versioning and tracked who made changes built into it, a single link would last much longer…
Ah, but you can use its versioning together with Word's Compare feature to nail the culprit. A significant part of my time is spent doing this, and circulating long quality-management emails about the best way forward. When they fork it, the "your project will now run late while I re-merge, it helps if you can [agreed working practice] as agreed" thinly-veiled sarcasm flamethrower comes out, cc to All. Tends to damp their enthusiasm. :-)
I think you'll find that the lack of such a mechanism was deliberate and regarded as a feature by the Muppets who laid down the original spec.
There is, of course, only a thin line (if any) between "an idiot can use it" and "only an idiot can use it". Good interface designers know the difference.
Oh, there is such a mechanism. "You cannot edit this document. It has been locked for editing by another user." Inevitably, said user has just gone on a fortnight's holiday, with no idea that ShitePlonk has locked it or why. Unfortunately, there is no way to activate this feature reliably when required, or de-activate it when not required, beyond a local admin going in every damn time someone triggers it accidentally.
Tip: create an Archive folder in every subfolder, and colour it grey. Move the locked file into it and replace it in the parent with a fresh copy, which will not be locked. Presently, your Library will run out of its allocated space and >KERCHING!< more space required. That's because the admin moved on and the stand-in for their successor has been refused training - which would have cost less. But that's Somebody Else's Problem now.
Where I am stationed some of the work partners think they can enable collaboration by sharing a document that then gets updated, with no change tracking.
The problem really shows itself when each group needs to take a snapshot of that live file for their silo's processing.
Some of the more diligent paperpushers like to think that everyone has nothing better to do than to watch the file for any and all changes.
Then what happens is that nobody knows if the set of assumptions that they've used are the same as another group's. Cue endless stare-and-compare projects.
Not so much a revolving door as a sausage machine.
I don't even recall what happened to the last one — or the one before that, or … bit of a blur really — not unlike the office of the UK PM, except they don't finish rolled up in carpet under the floor of the basement of Nº10. More's the pity.
In theory it's a good idea.
But too many times it's a case of the following.
"The documents are on the SharePoint, I need you to review by COB today"
"Which Sharepoint site?"
"Sent you a link"
"I don't have permissions to that site and won't let me request it"
"Oh, let me see who can assign you permissions"
Several days go by
"Still can't get in"
"Oh, sorry, let me chase XYZ again"
"Can't you just send me the file while we wait?
" Oh no, couldn't possibly do that, I don't know how to merge your comments from a standalone copy"
And you get a new S****point with every group you create. Each folder has its own ACLs and there is no easy way of mapping user permissions. That said, you can do something nice things with Powershell but that's sort of like praising the needlework on your stitches after you've accidentally hacked of your own foot.
Where I currently work we've got the dreaded S word, OneDrive, two different but vaguely related on-premise EDRM systems, at least three SaaS platforms that allow file storage, and then some on-premise file servers. You're never finding anything unless you wrote it yourself, know where you saved it, and have a good notion that no-one else has been near it.
In my shop we have been strictly told to tell people, fully grown adult type people, that OneDrive is for me, Teams is for We and SharePoint is for Everyone.
All because every few months someone leaves without handing over important files that were stored in their OneDrive and which were subsequently trashed along with their account.
I know, the issue here is that everybody who uses International/British English understands the American/Simplified version but some Americans can't comprehend that there might be different spellings for some words.
So I suppose they have to decide if they want lots of messages saying "color" is not spelled that way or if they want messages like yours. Either way someone is going to be pissed, obviously I would agree with you that they've made the wrong choice, but to paraphrase Ms Mandy Rice Davies, I would say that, wouldn't I.
If only there was some way to localise web pages.
It was majestic the times I had to use it. A true eighth wonder of the world and by wonder I mean wonder why the fuck someone has asked me to do some work asap on something in sharepoint they don't own and I don't have permission to access meaning I have to wait days for some random person to give me access. Even without the many days long waits you can also factor in multi-national corporations where everyone is on different time zones and you're screwed anyway. It gets even better from there when they give you read-only access but you are supposed to put the completed work back in the same place so off you go on the sharepoint merry-go-round again. Not only that but any tom, dick or harry can create the folder structure for their department so good luck finding shit in any obvious standard way.
In case I'm not being clear I really dislike sharepoint. I know exactly what the T word is and it was a bane of my life for quite some time especially when the organisation structure is nothing but speculative bullshit that no one could be arsed updating or no one was tasked with doing.
Rant done. To be fair as a former business analyst you do learn to overcome all these problems over time. It's not something you are taught though and it's what separates a good analyst from a standard analyst.
I'm retired, but volunteer as a technical assessor for a national ISO accreditation authority. At a recent-ish assessment, where the organization used ShareP- I asked a user to retrieve a materials specification certificate. They went on to the computer, clicked all over the place, and eventually said that they would ask someone else to find it. I was presented with a printout of the document the next day.
I casually asked how long it had taken to find it, the person wasn't sure; but replied that "ShareP- is OK, provided you can remember where the document was filed". I started to smile - until I realised that it was a serious, factual, statement.
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