Mar 11, 2016 Alister Grigg

Content Suite is not a Bowl of Cereal

Imagine you want to share dinner withsome close friends.  You can choose between preparing a meal at home, or meeting at a well-known restaurant.

Dinner at home sounds attractive, the local bookshop has some cookbooks and there are millions of things to choose from at the supermarket.   You just need to plan the meal, find the right recipes, head down to the shops to get the ingredients, and know what you want before you get there, and schedule time to prepare the meal.

Oh, you can’t cook what you need?  Or don’t have time?  Fair enough, plenty of chefs for hire someone who can do that for you – and what’s more they say they’ve done it before for dozens of others.  Sounds great!

Say, that chef you hired wants to know what exactly you want.  And how you want it done.  Same as the one next door or something a little different?  Maybe you want it with trimmings, a few sides, or presented as several courses?  What do your guests prefer?  What will they eat and do they have any dietary concerns?

No matter, your chef is sure you can have exactly what you want, no problems.  So you spend a few days looking at the options and decide to go with something perfect for what you need.  And chef goes off to the supermarket to get the extras, and then back to the kitchen for a few hours of hard work.  And bonus, you get a supply of frozen meals.  Hooray!!

The meal is fine and after it’s done you say goodbye to the chef and get on with having the same meal every night for the next month.  But hey, something goes wrong with that report – oops, meal – and so you call the chef to come over to fix it and to tweak it up a bit while they’re there.  Maybe add another side.

But they’re busy on another assignment for the next few months so you need someone else to come and fix it.  You find someone and sadly when they look at the recipe they find that the original chef ran out of time and ingredients so took some, let’s just say, ‘shortcuts’.   String and tape holding your prized recipe together.  Which you’ve been eating for a month and worse, sharing with your family!  Can be fixed but better to start again and don’t forget to throw out the rest of the frozen meals.

Sound familiar?   Now consider this, you’re not doing this for a meal.  You’re doing this for a key part of one of your critical business systems.  That manages access to your core business information – privacy, confidentiality, compliance and all that.  To many that’s not the most exciting thing but it’s the sort of thing lawyers love to poke holes in.

So why would you take risks with it?  Maybe you would for a bowl of cereal but Content Suite is not a bowl of cereal, it’s a grand banquet held every day of the month, month after month, year after year.  Save yourself the pain and don’t take risks, don’t try to re-invent the wheel.  Take the proven road, use the proven product.

Fastman Permissions Manager.  Proven, effective, supported

Published by Alister Grigg March 11, 2016