Users eh, who’d have them?

Users never cease to amaze me with the decisions they make.

We bought, at great expense, an e-mail archiving system so we could keep our exchange systems lean mean and responsive. We went with Enterprise Vault as it was the only real player in town back then (version 5 and the KVS days, then Veritas now Symantec). Yes it is a bit clunky and probably wouldn’t be my choice if we were to pick a solution now, not just because it is Symantec but that would be a big factor.

Anyway back to the users, all they have to do is leave everything as is and the Vault will drag off all the stuff more than 4 weeks old and leave a short cut in place of the e-mail, it is all pretty transparent to user, if they get a big email they can manually archive it with a couple of clicks.

All simple stuff, all emails and attachments are indexed and there are some simple and more complex search methods, which are really quite quick considering the 6TB of emails and attachments we have archived, and an IE based browser.

So why then would a user go to all the trouble of creating a folder structure in the personal drive and copy emails in to there, not simple couple of folders but a deeply complicated structure containing a couple of thousand emails and 30 or 40 folders nested 3 or 4 levels? Yes I have no idea either, you can’t search these emails very effectively, there is no indexing of the attachments, it just madness.

After finding one user we did a quick scan and another couple of users had something similar set up. The original user explained that she didn’t like the vault and that a trainer had said this was good way to do it and that is how they did it at the last company and she liked it. Well, being a bit of a dictator in these things I shall explain that tough, email goes in the vault so you better get to like it.

Other stories of users being stupid include our chief finance director explaining he had got an email from HSBC about a problem with his account and could he log on to the website and reset his password, he didn’t have an HSBC account so he went to website and put his Barclays Bank details in instead!

We have one guy who we rebuild his home pc for him every 3-6 months as it is riddled with viruses. We clean build it, add free AV and set up accounts so his kids are just users, explain how to do everything and not to let the kids log on as him, don’t install any file sharing software, then it comes back with Limewire and numerous other file sharing software, unlicensed copies of Office etc. and the AV is turned off. He then tells us he had to let his kids log on as him as they couldn’t do anything. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

A clasic one was when an editor at a publishing company was asked to type a colon he came back with What's a colon? I don't have a colon key." How teh hell did he get that job?