Terminology....

[eek]

All right, "where do you save files that others in your team/department/company can see and share?"...

If they can't answer that, there's no point in asking then.

Also this is an AD admin question, who should have all these things mapped already.

Hardly - this is classic shadow IT where people are doing what works for them based on the idea of a vaguely IT literate colleague.

[ladymuck]

All right, "where do you save files that others in your team/department/company can see and share?"...

If they can't answer that, there's no point in asking then.

Also this is an AD admin question, who should have all these things mapped already.

Some people access shared drives using the \\server\share route from Run or a desktop shortcut or by pasting a link into explorer and some via drives mapped by logon script. Different departments have different destination drive mappings. Some shares are on kit owned by the client's ex-parent company. Some are on kit owned by the client. Data ownership in any given share could be the ex-parent or the client. It's a 15 year old mess of cobbled together crud because the parent co has merged with / taken over several companies, split them off, bought some more etc etc.

I don't think an AD admin mapping a drive or two will fix any of that so we have to ask the users which network storage resources they use for their jobs and the comms person has no technology experience so is obtusely asking for the definition of a network share as they think all the users are as challenged as them.

[malvolio]

Fine. But a network share, in layman's terms, is where you put files that are to be shared, as opposed to things on your C: drive (aka Microsoft's default locations) that aren't. How they are shared and how users connect to them is not all that relevant, beyond knowing what they are.

I once had to track down some 300-plus virtual C: drives on an EMC array hosting a lesser number of virtual PCs (the balance had been deleted over the years) in a dying DR datacentre,. Given EMC is a black box solution, this was less that straightforward and took time and a degree of trial and error. So I have a lot of sympathy for your predicament, but the blockage is the idiot in comms, not anyone in IT nor the users. AS I suspect you already know!

[_V_]

To appease a comms person I need a friendly explanation of what a network share is. I've mentioned it's sometimes called 'shared network drive', 'mapped drive' etc but the comms person is insistent that no-one outside IT knows what those terms mean and I must provide a different description.

I'm stumped, what would you describe such a thing as?

For some reason I imagine this is you talking to the comms people.

[ladymuck]

For some reason I imagine this is you talking to the comms people.

I'm not sure which side of the counter I was on

[NotAllThere]

...so we have to ask the users which network storage resources they use for their jobs...

Just switch them all off and see who screams.

[eek]

Just switch them all off and see who screams.

Easy to do with the official stuff - far harder when you don't know where they exist.

[malvolio]

Just switch them all off and see who screams.

My usual description of the need for a CMDB...

[ladymuck]

Just switch them all off and see who screams.

The trouble is, with a 25 year retention period on some stuff, it could be decades before someone notices