If your environment is not well designed, power users are to be feared. If you’ve thought through and anticipated the kinds of things the business wants to do via SharePoint, power users are to be embraced and rewarded. They are the drivers of enabling your SharePoint environment to deliver real value.
Obscurity by Security
It happens every day. A user gets an email with a link to some high value content only to have their access blocked. Hmm. The user replies to the sender and requests that they get permission to the site. Here’s where things get interesting. Maybe the sender has the ability to add users to the site, maybe not. If the sender does have the privilege, have they been trained in the subtleties of SharePoint permissions? Does the site utilize existing AD groups and should the new user actually be added to the AD group? Who makes that call? How is access to the content governed in the first place, if at all?
Just because SharePoint enables users to provision their own security doesn’t mean IT should let this genie out of the bottle without adequate genie training. My 14 year-old can reach the gas pedal and drive go karts like no one’s business but he needs some formal driving instructions before he hits the open road.
Security issues are just one of the ways that SharePoint power users get frustrated with the technology and with IT. The good news is that SharePoint has out-of-the-box tooling which gracefully handles permissions and lots of other stuff as well. But it means that IT has to step up and provide power users with focused training on the nuts and bolts of SharePoint.
A Little Knowledge is Dangerous
So now you’ve trained your users on security and permission configuration. Great. Now that your power users know how SharePoint works with AD, they can add/delete users, create custom permission levels, and may even know how to break permission inheritance. What they probably don’t know is when and why. A little bit of thoughtful governance goes a long way toward keeping the SharePoint environment productive.
In future blogs I’ll discuss how this ambiguous and over used term of governance can actually be harnessed, defined and most importantly implemented in a way that keeps the genie in check but is still able to grant the occasional wish.