SharePoint and B2E

The girls are away for the week, and a buddy referred to me on his blog. Now I have to write something or we all just look lame.
Been really struggling at work trying to get Microsoft Sharepoint working responsibly.

The major challenge here is that it seems fairly visually stunning to users (including the crowd that decided to buy it, and presumably pay for it), yet those of us empowered to make it work are in a bit of a bind. I try not to deal with M$ products in general as it is never a happy seamless experience. It is my job to ensure that when our directory of users is updated to show that you no longer work for Business Unit A, but in fact now work for BU = B, you no longer have access to documents and distribution lists that are inappropriate to your new role.

Herein lies the problem. Sharepoint works off Active Directory (it has it's own store of users as well, but I'll gloss over that bit in the name of clarity), but requires group membership to define access rights. You work for the Retail BU, you end up in the Retail group. You change to work for anther BU, for sharepoint to work, you have to be removed from Retail and put in the new group. Real software would do this dynamically and just "know" when you changed role.

As we scratched our head and wondered how we would deliver, along came BitKoo. In a completely unrelated conf call, they mentioned an abstraction layer for Sharepoint. Install the small BitKoo dll, and you don't need Active Dir, you don't need groups, in fact you can point Sharepoint to any directory you like and it just works. We are in the throes of testing and news will be forthcoming (if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is)