While changing a tire recently, I ran across something I hadn’t seen before: plastic caps over the lug nuts. There was no obvious way to remove them, so I checked the yellow sticker next to the jack in the trunk – no clues there. The owner’s manual was more informative, instructing me to use a tool that was, unfortunately, missing… but a McGyver’d clothes hanger did the trick.
In between bouts of cussing out the car manufacturer for making the process of changing a tire more time-consuming and complicated than it needs to be, I thought about the concept of self-documenting systems. In any network, the order of desirability is 1) intuitive systems that are self-explanatory, 2) non-intuitive systems that, however, provide their own documentation, and 3) non-intuitive systems that make you hunt down the documentation that you need. In my tire-changing scenario, an intuitive, self-explanatory system would have been not to use the stupid plastic caps (!), and a well-documented system would have been one where the yellow sticker in the trunk showed how to remove them.
So what does this have to do with Server 2008? Among other things, Server 2008 lets you annotate Group Policy settings with comments – a really good idea, especially if your use of Group Policy isn’t necessarily straightforward or obvious. Put the documentation at the point of use. Consider it the equivalent of the yellow sticker!
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