| William H. Magill on Tue, 13 May 2003 15:53:44 -0400 |
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On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 09:13 AM, Arthur S. Alexion wrote: On Tue, 2003-05-13 at 16:41, Paul wrote:Not everyone is as goofy-confident as myself when In addition to storing traditional data fields, Time Matters incorporates Document Management into the system. When the documents are on the Samba server, they are running into permission problems with shared files. Sigh... this is where the Industry, not just Microsoft, constantly falls flat on its face. Except for incredibly narrow situations, nothing in the business is "plug-and-play." As long as a single CPU is stand-alone, "permissions" are no problem. As soon as you connect two (or more) CPUs together, they are. There is an expectation in the industry that environments with multiple computers have "technical" people with specialized knowledge. There is an expectation in the general population, compliments of the Sales organization of every company in the business, that "you don't need to be technical," "anybody can do this." This is compounded when the systems are expected to be used for more than one thing, like time-management, document-management and email. You can create a "specific function" "black box" fairly easily, but a "general purpose" "black-box" is not going to be "user friendly." The only "semi-rational" solution (i.e. cost effective) is for someone in the office (typically an already overworked secretary, since they won't hire the person they need) to become "tech-savvy." That person becomes the "server administrator" and learns what is necessary to manage the permissions ... eventually, usually by spending lots of time with dial-a-prayer. The problem is that people tend to think they "understand" what they are doing. Somebody reads a couple of columns in the Inquirer, then thinks they can do this a whole lot cheaper than by hiring a consultant. They then goes out and buy a computer(s) and some software and expect it to "just work." The second problem occurs "next week," when they want to do something different than what they are doing today -- this lawyer gets assigned to another case, that para-legal gets assigned to this one, and the "Partner" expects to be able to review everything. All of those things are completely orthogonal to the original setup. An important thing to consider about "permissions" -- Permissions are Security! Set permissions wrong and anybody in the world can read your briefs! (wrong = connect to the Internet.) Why? because some email virus is going to mail a copy of a random document it finds to everybody in your address book... oops... just violated A) HIPPA, B) Attorney-Client privilege, etc. And that ignores the multitudes of other potential problems and embarrassments. Minimally, hire a consultant that understands the security ramifications of the software/application you are implementing to get you started. Then get somebody in-house trained to maintain that security. It's not going to be "easy." T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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