Ooops… (alt title: How I screwed up MDM) (MDM pt. 2)

This should be fairly quick, (it doesn’t take long to fall on a sword) but I thought I would just come out with one of the first “big mistakes” that we made with our MDM deployment.  And by “we”, I really mean “me”…

So – let me ask you this.  Just how important do you think it is, that when someone receives an e-mail on their phone, and that e-mail contains a link…for example, to a doc on a Sharepoint site… and that Sharepoint site is accessible via MDM….  Just how important do you think it is, that they should be able to click on the link, and have that doc open?

Well my big mistake was to think that since providing that functionality AND getting user authentication in place would be insanely complicated and hard….  that it wasn’t THAT big of deal.  To me (being the AD/ADFS guy, single sign-on and user authentication were much more important.)  The trade off in our deployment which we made, was the assumption that users could hit the Sharepoint site, and drill down to the doc that they were looking for.

Holy jeepers Batman, was I wrong about that!  (this is the part, where you the reader, can go:  “DUH!”)

Turns out, that if you don’t provide this functionality, then river and seas boil, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria![1] You have no idea what kind of crap I have endured over this!!!!

Let me be clear – as of today, right now, no – we are NOT providing this functionality.  The next few (several?) posts on this topic, will be about our existing design, which does not allow for this.

But please, make no mistake – there are forces conspiring, virtual teams have been formed, e-mails have been launched, meetings are called, and engineers are standing at the ready – solely to correct this most egregious error!  (we just need to figure out how, while maintaining the rest of the integrity of the system)

 

[1] You soooo know where this came from…