K12IT

I like problems. 

Yeah, I know how it sounds, but I do. If you think about it, you probably do too, at some level.  It is a large part what we IT professionals do - identify a problem; analyze it and develop a solution for it.

There is a huge beneficial side effect inherent in the second part of that process - analysis. When we analyse a problem, we have to research the surrounding issues to understand as many aspects of the causes of the 'problem' as we can because, ultimately, we want to find the root cause. Herein lies the beneficial side effect - learning. I have discovered that this is one of the best learning oppourtunities I could encounter. Sometimes it's nice to take a class proactively to try and leverage into a new technology, but for my money -- and the money invested in me by my employer -- OJT is hard to beat. Many times I've come back from a training session only to find myself not able to employ the newly found skills I had just acquired and slowly see those skills ebb away from lack of use in short a period of time. The classic "Use it or lose it".

OK, so where am I going with this? As part of the SharePoint Help Desk team, I often get requests to give a new user the same permissions as 'so and so' or the same persmissions as the person they are replacing. Now as anyone who has done a little bit of SharePoint user admin will tell you, out-of-the-box SharePoint gives you no tools whatsoever to find out all the permissions granted to an individual user and so you either make do or buy a third-party tool. That's where my analysis kicks in and I am off and running -- or should I say off and learning? During this latest OJT jaunt, I ran across two things that I think would be very useful to anyone tasked with user admin. The first is a very detailed whitepaper I found on the BambooSolutions website titledSharePoint User Management. Disclaimer: I am not advocating for or against any of their products....perhaps that might be fodder for a later post. I think this is a great article because it gives a complete view of the user environment from the top of the Farm to the bottom of a Document Library. The second little gem I uncovered is a video presentation by Dux Raymond Sy, the author of SharePoint for Project Management, entitled Best Practices for SharePoint User Management. Not only another good overview of the user but also includes real tools you can use to 'make do' as I offered above.

Now a request. Anyone out there also encountering problems in managing users and permissions on SharePoint?
How did you overcome those problems. In-house? Third-Party?

Next post, I will share some more about the solutions that I run across in my continued research.

Let me hear from you!