Terrible SharePoint Design

I nearly clawed my eyes out this afternoon. We use SharePoint in a few places at work for wikis and sharing documents and I recently inherited one of the sites. I had a simple need to take a list of users (called a group) that was about 60 people long and move 40 of them to a new group. The first problem I ran in to was that there was no way to do this without creating a second group first, adding each user, and then deleting the old ones. Harder than just dragging and dropping or something but I could manage. So I create my group and scribble down 40 names on a piece of paper and go to enter those names. I get an error message. Apparently if that user doesn’t exist at the company anymore it fails (SharePoint is linked up with our contact directory in Exchange/Outlook/Active Directory). The error message tells me that it has not added any new users beyond the one it failed at. Lame, some lazy programmer couldn’t just skip it and add everything else to give me a list of all failed adds at the end? So if the 2nd user in my list of 40 failed the other 38 still had to be added. I had about 6 users that didn’t exist. SO the last thing that really destroyed me is that they don’t tell you the user that actually failed to be added. Instead it is smarter than you since it looked up their login ID and tells you that instead. So if I enter “Joe Pfeiffer” it would say user “v12345″ could not be added. I have no idea who v12345 is since I entered a list of 40 names. So I look up the login ID’s in our web search interface. Someone is not thinking about work flow with this product.

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