Give all your data to the clown!


  • area_deu

    Got a mail from $CUSTOMER super-top-management today (we have accounts in the $CUSTOMER AD because we need to do remote stuff and also get on their premises, so we get all the inspiring emails meant for employees as well).

    They are moving all "My Documents" shares to "the cloud".

    :wtf:s encountered just in that hurrah mail and linked documentation:

    • storing internal corporate data on the public internet (they do NOT run the servers themselves)
    • estimating savings of € 50,000,000 by that move
    • telling people "this system works perfectly" and "you must not use this system for sensitive or secret documents" literally four lines apart
    • before sharing "technical documents" across country borders, you have to make sure you meet export regulations (WAT? It's the cloud, how the fuck should I know if that document just crossed a border?)
    • in the Android version of their cloud client thing (didn't check for other versions), if you share a document with somebody else YOU CANNOT EDIT IT until that person gives it back to you
    • Shit gets synchronised from the "cloud" to your local storage, so you better have enough hard disk capacity. No more freeloading off those file servers for you!

    I'm really looking forward to the big roll-out. Give your data to the clown! Clown access! Clown storage! Clowns everywhere!

    • Honk * * honk *

  • area_deu

    Oh I totally forgot:
    The logo for this initiative is literally a cloud raining documents onto peoples' computers and devices.
    :facepalm:



  • Better get an umbrella for the fallout ...


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @ChrisH said:

    estimating savings of € 50,000,000 by that move

    I would really love to know what calculations are the basis for this...
    Did you guys buy a new lifelong rapidshare/pastebin/whatever account everytime you wanted to share something?

    Filed Under: You can also save $500,000,000,000,000,- by transfering all your companies money to me! :trollface: Please make this suggestion at the next meeting.



  • Cloud to clown is certainly funnier than cloud to butt.


  • area_deu

    @Kuro said:

    I would really love to know what calculations are the basis for this...

    Me too.

    Did you guys buy a new lifelong rapidshare/pastebin/whatever account everytime you wanted to share something?
    It's not us, it's the morons at $CUSTOMER central IT headquarters. I assume their file servers are massive gold or something like that.


  • @ChrisH said:

    estimating savings of € 50,000,000 by that move

    Man, those were some expensive shares!

    @ChrisH said:

    "you must not use this system for sensitive or secret documents"

    Oh, OK then. I'll use the new system for the rest of documents, and store the sensitive data in a USB drive that I'll carry with me at all times.

    @ChrisH said:

    if you share a document with somebody else YOU CANNOT EDIT IT until that person gives it back to you

    That's some nice skeuomorphism! It's just like sharing a real paper document. Makes things more intuitive.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @ChrisH said:

    storing internal corporate data on the public internet (they do NOT run the servers themselves)

    Aren't you German? Depending on the kind of information stored on those shares, this might also be a huge legal problem (privacy laws).


  • area_deu

    @asdf said:

    Aren't you German?

    Yup.

    Depending on the kind of information stored on those shares, this might also be a huge legal problem (privacy laws).
    Yup. I assume this is why they tried to cover their asses by telling users not to store anything on it that might lead to legal problems. I'm not going to ask them. I'll just wait until this blows up in their faces.


  • @ChrisH said:

    estimating savings of € 50,000,000

    @ChrisH said:

    you must not use this system for sensitive or secret documents

    So, what do people do with sensitive documents? I'll bet the recommendation is to store them on company servers. If they still need to maintain and administer company servers, they are going to have a hard time saving that 50 million.



  • @Kuro said:

    @ChrisH said:
    estimating savings of € 50,000,000 by that move

    I would really love to know what calculations are the basis for this...

    It's just an error in the display formatting — too many significant digits and a stray decimal separator. It's really € 50,00.



  • The phrase "head in the cloud(s)" seems soooooo appropriate right about now...


  • Garbage Person

    WtfCorp uses Google Drive and gdocs for "everything".


  • area_deu

    @Jaime said:

    So, what do people do with sensitive documents?

    They probably keep them in Outlook. So instead of cheap file servers they now need more fucking expensive Exchange servers.


  • area_deu

    @HardwareGeek said:

    It's just an error in the display formatting — too many significant digits and a stray decimal separator. It's really € 50,00.

    They explicitly wrote "50 Millionen Euro".

    I'm tempted to write one of the huggy-feely persons listed in the email and ask them how they came up with that number. We need that customer too much to ask the same question via reply-all.



  • @ChrisH said:

    They probably keep them in Outlook. So instead of cheap file servers they now need more fucking expensive Exchange servers.

    Hosted in Ireland on Office 365, of course.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @ChrisH said:

    They explicitly wrote "50 Millionen Euro".

    I'm tempted to write one of the huggy-feely persons listed in the email and ask them how they came up with that number.

    They brought in a consultant. He claimed he saved them 50 million and quoted 25 mill.

    …in unrelated news, I just bought a new yacht.


  • area_deu

    @AlexMedia said:

    Hosted in Ireland on Office 365, of course.

    That's probably the next hare-brained "initiative", yes. Anything to save a buck this quarter.



  • @Weng said:

    WtfCorp uses Google Drive and gdocs for "everything".

    Have your IT guys issued admin staff with Chromebooks? If all they need is gdrive, gdocs and gmail why get them an expensive fancy laptop that needs antivirus?



  • Benefits of working on Secret Squirrel stuff in Secret Squirrel buildings on a Secret Squirrel network: the cloud is absolutely not going to happen here.

    Downsides of Secret Squirrel: Gmail is blocked on my internet computer. :(



  • @ChrisH said:

    estimating savings of € 50,000,000 by that move

    Is that, like, a sum total over the next 5-10,000 years?



  • @anonymous234 said:

    That's some nice skeuomorphism! It's just like sharing a real paper document. Makes things more intuitive.

    They're probably getting things ready so they can use git for version control.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Weng said:

    WtfCorp uses Google Drive and gdocs for "everything".

    So do our users. They like it much more than the Sharepoint site provided by central IT; they can actually collaborate on things and it Just Works™. The vast majority of our stuff is only sensitive in so far as it hasn't been published in a scientific journal yet. 😄

    I think there's software that can layer good encryption on top to get real corporate control and so on, but our users don't care about that. (Is strong-encrypted data really out of your control when the encrypted version ends up in a foreign jurisdiction?)



  • No need to. I just assume it's some executive(s) want reason for promotion / big bonus, so they has to "do something" as basis for that raise in position or payment.

    I think even if the technical folks choose move them to a "local cloud" and don't get that much saving in the end, they'll still declare it as success.

    Filed Under: I originally thought the term "local cloud" is lame, then taught it can have brilliant use.



  • @dkf said:

    @Weng said:
    WtfCorp uses Google Drive and gdocs for "everything".

    So do our users. They like it much more than the Sharepoint site provided by central IT; they can actually collaborate on things and it Just Works™. The vast majority of our stuff is only sensitive in so far as it hasn't been published in a scientific journal yet. 😄

    I think there's software that can layer good encryption on top to get real corporate control and so on, but our users don't care about that. (Is strong-encrypted data really out of your control when the encrypted version ends up in a foreign jurisdiction?)

    Indeed. Well-administered Sharepoint is much more beneficial to users in a Microsoft environment than any other cloud solution.... and I've seen a grand total of one well-administered farm in my lifetime, compared to dozens of slipshod ones that should have been sent to an early grave. Not that Microsoft makes it easy with good management tools, you apparently need a Ph.D. to properly administer Sharepoint. I'd rather take a corporate Google Docs account any day, mere mortals can easily handle that.


  • Garbage Person

    Negative. Nobody I know can find SHIT in the corporate Google docs.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    Nobody I know can find SHIT in the corporate Google docs.

    no one i know can find crap in our corporate sharepoint either.

    just goes to show you that a tool is only as good as your organization organizes



  • @foxyshadis said:

    Indeed. Well-administered Sharepoint is much more beneficial to users in a Microsoft environment than any other cloud solution.

    Have Microsoft gotten real time document collaboration to work? That was gdocs killer feature.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    no one i know can find crap in our corporate sharepoint either.

    It's pretty typical for how we do things: there's a whole system for organising data and categorising stuff, and it's disabled from the perspective of users because it can potentially cause some performance problems, yet users are warned direly to not use something that actually works like a simple hierarchic arrangement because that also might cause problems. The message that comes across is that only management are allowed to create information; everyone else should just sit there and consume it. That's an extremely unpopular sell to a bunch of researchers, who all know for sure that creating information is at the core of their job.

    “There might be problems!”
    “Yes. But you're so scared of the potential problems, you're forcing other problems to definitely exist.”

    Rinse, repeat, regurgitate…


  • BINNED

    Used it on PowerPoint and Word


  • FoxDev

    @swayde said:

    Have Microsoft gotten real time document collaboration to work? That was gdocs killer feature.

    Yep: it's been part of Office since at least 2013, probably earlier


  • Garbage Person

    I don't understand how you're even supposed to organize in gdocs. You can create a folder structure, but whether Google will actually deign to show it to you is apparently at random. They seem to sort everything roughly by the last time you accessed it (which is GREAT when you want something you don't deal with every day) and then throw out the structural elements. It seems like Google wants you to search for everything, but half the time that won't return what you want even when you nail the title exactly from memory.

    As a result, documentation gets indexed offline (in word docs on regular fileshares) with links to the google docs and collaboration stuff gets linked from the meeting invites and emails relevant to the collaboration, and those are the canonical ways to find anything. Of course, if you can't find the meeting invites and emails, you're fucked.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said:

    You can create a folder structure, but whether Google will actually deign to show it to you is apparently at random

    i can confidently say i have never encountered this particular issue.

    we have a folder structure for the IT GDocs (officially we're trialing it, unofficially it's just one of big boss's fads) and it always shows folder structure when accessed via drive.google.com (which integrates perfectly with docs)



  • @RaceProUK said:

    Yep: it's been part of Office since at least 2013, probably earlier

    In my experience, not in the same form.
    GDocs had true, type along with the others and see their work in real-time, collaboration.
    Word has, we'll merge the changes on save, collaboration.

    Very much different.



  • @MHolt said:

    Word has, we'll merge the changes on save, collaboration.

    I think it has proper collab in 2016.



  • That looks like a thin layer over office365. That's cheating, and needs onedrive to work. ideally it'd work on lan or domain .


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Jaime said:

    servers

    You mean self-hosted, centralized clouds.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @cheong said:

    No need to. I just assume it's some executive(s) want reason for promotion / big bonus, so they has to "do something" as basis for that raise in position or payment.

    It's also why the quoted figure. Their bonus is explicitly tied into "earning" the company so much money. It doesn't have to be REAL money-- or provable in any way-- or not at the expense of a massive loss in the future-- as long as it's within this fiscal year: bonus.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lorne_Kates said:

    You mean self-hosted, centralized clouds.

    What about calling it a picocloud? A ratio of a million-million to one seems reasonable…



  • @ChrisH said:

    we have accounts in the $CUSTOMER AD because we need to do remote stuff and also get on their premises, so we get all the inspiring emails meant for employees as well

    What is federation?



  • Sharepoint blows too. Searched for a document by its exact title the other day, got 10+ year old document as first result. Actual document I wanted was on the third page. What even?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @rc4 said:

    Searched for a document by its exact title the other day, got 10+ year old document as first result. Actual document I wanted was on the third page. What even?

    I suspect that something like the “importance” of the document is being sort the results of the search, and that the search is being treated like an OR of all the words you provided. It's not like anyone's thought of a better way of doing search of a set of documents in the last 20 years. 😾 I don't know if it works better by default and people have to break it “because they are management and know better”, or if it works in that retarded way by default unless a developer configures the installation to use vaguely-modern technology.

    It's not like databases cannot have a full text searching capability either. How to do that has been understood for a fair while now. Heck, you can even do it in embedded databases. Why wouldn't you support such capabilities in a flagship corporate data organisation product?

    Sometimes I just feel like despairing; at least I can make the code that I write better.



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    @Jaime said:
    servers

    You mean self-hosted, centralized clouds.

    No, the servers work the cafeteria. The self-hosed centralized clowns are in the C suite.


  • Java Dev

    Cloud in a box?


  • FoxDev

    @PleegWat said:

    Cloud in a box?



  • That looks decidedly more reliable than the Discourse cloud in a box.


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