Planning meeting falls short of - then exceeds - expectations: film at 11

  I work at media/entertainment conglomerate as a .NET developer currently working on content management system.  During a recent planning meeting, the discussion took an interesting turn when it came to the topic of integrating the users' logins into Active Directory.

  I had been talking about the next steps for the project and noted that "We should also integrate the login functionality with AD so that we can simplify that piece for the users."

  Anne - the Enterprise Architect - spoke up.  "What is AD?"

  "Sorry, AD is short for Active Directory," I replied.

  "Oh, ok sure,"  she said, "Now, what is Active Directory?"

  I stumbled momentarily, stunned.  "Active Directory is a service that allows users and computers to be listed in a directory so that they can be centrally managed."

  The group launched into a brief description of AD and group policy before turning it back over to Anne.

  "Iiiinnteresting..."  Anne trailed off, her mind whirling with possibilities.  "Ok, ok, I think I get it.  In order to really leverage this asset, I'm going to need the path to the directory so I can look at the files."

  All of the developers at the table started darting their eyes around at one another so that we could assure each other that we had, in fact, heard her correctly.

  "It doesn't really work that way, Anne, there's, like, a browser for that.  You know, a MMC plugin."

  Anne's face relaxed into a state of understanding.  "Gotcha, well, I don't usually use Explorer (I'm a safari lover) but I can fire it up and I think I have most of the multimedia content plugins already loaded: Flash, Quicktime, you know..."

  Tom - the contract programmer who had recently been "end-of-lifed" - took over.

  "Sure, Anne, it's simple to get to with explorer," he said confidently, "It's the 4th channel of communication available to servers and clients, so, just navigate to img.4chan.org/b and you'll be there.  It also has some occassional conflicts with anti-virus and anti-spyware technologies, so, you'll probably want to turn those off first."

(submitted by MP)