The Single Sign On
by Volker Weber
A must-read for systems architects:
"It's impossible," Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, "simply impossible."
"Now just so we're clear," Craig responded, "by 'impossible', you actually mean 'a big pain in the ass', but you're a smart guy who can make it happen, right?"
[via Mariano]
Comments
oh, i want that too. gotta call my IT guy...
Lovely story. It's always the same: nobody takes the time to figure out why a particular requirement is issued, or rather, the wrong people do the talking; the back-end guys are the ones who should be asking questions. Instead it is usually an no-know middle-management-guy who has no idea and doesn't know what questions to ask.
Ok, I am scared.
That puts the 'single' back into 'sign on'!
Usually it works the other way around. Requirement is "one user only, ever". After is has been deployed the requirement changes to "and a few others".
Yeah, great - to quote one of the comments already on that page:
"A person who is too dumb or lazy to remember one [jolly] password is entrusted with patients' health care records?"
Very fair comment. but then, I know how it goes in the health service world view....
I once had a project, where the client absolutely wanted to have a very strict and elaborate access control feature in a relatively simple CRM Domino app. Only the management and therefore the secretaries should have the overall view.
I tried to get this access-level-monster out of the project, knowing that the people in all divisions knew perfectly well what the other guys were doing. It was a relatively small company with mostly young employees. The office kitchen was nice and also served as smoker room at the time. In other words the kitchen was the java-based facebook office wiki twitter :-) If you wanted to stiffle communication, simply change the lock to the kitchen.
But as this was the "wish" of one of the managers with a C in the title, we had to implement the access obstruction. When we showed the final app to the customer, and the username password box popped up, he turned down to use the keyboard himself and said, 'oh, but we all have the same password, it is "123456"!' All I could think about is: 'if I had a hammer'...
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