Category Network Engineering

The Ghost in the SharePoint Farm

Tomiko and three IT colleagues investigate a ghostly apparition emerging from a SharePoint 2007 monitor in a dark server room, unaware of the glowing eyes beneath a desk.

Somewhere inside the International Monetary Fund, a SharePoint farm began behaving as though it were haunted. Servers failed, error messages offered little explanation, and the evidence stubbornly refused to agree with the documentation.

In this true story from the trenches of enterprise IT, Doc Tomiko and her colleagues follow a trail of increasingly improbable clues through the peculiar architecture of SharePoint 2007. Part technical detective story, part workplace comedy, and part homage to the great supernatural investigators of television, The Ghost in the SharePoint Farm demonstrates why troubleshooting is less about knowing all the answers than knowing which questions to ask.

Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house.