When talking to editors and content managers I’m often reminded of @greatdismal’s classic line: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
@GreatDismal Galleries repurposed as quiz engines. Workflows built around AppleScript automation of http://Pages.app. Load bearing XSS exploits.
Nothing really shocked me, though, until a client asked us to help “clean up the Sharepoint email templates.”
Big intranet, thousands of employees, departmental blogs replacing email distribution lists. Subscribers get alerts, easy peasy.
But.
It was hard to manage, they said. And the emails were hard to read. To get the ball rolling, they logged in to show us what they meant.
Our client opened one of the more popular blogs. Hit ‘Edit Permissions.’ And waited.
And waited.
When the screen finally loaded, thousands of individual employees were listed as “managers” for the page.
Each blog, see, was a single page. New “posts” would be added to the top. And content managers — “subscribers” — got email about the change.
They showed us the confusing emails – the ones they wanted us clean up. They were diffs. Raw HTML diffs of all changes made to the blog.
Thousands of employees, hundreds of internal company announcements, all being managed by shuffling HTML diffs around via editorial workflow.
The street finds its own uses for things. Even Sharepoint.