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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

Part of the problem is that every identity provider is different. So you'd have to provide docs for every single one of them and their particularities.

And customers don't necessarily read the docs, or even if they do they don't configure everything correctly.

And we're not even at customization that is particular to the customer. How to represent that in their identity provider and how to get your application to follow that in the way the customer expects.

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> Part of the problem is that every identity provider is different. So you'd have to provide docs for every single one of them and their particularities.

no, you just provide the most used ones, once you have like top 5, that helps a lot

> And customers don't necessarily read the docs, or even if they do they don't configure everything correctly.

so just like with any other feature, really

also you should be improving docs, if they are not clear, make them clearer

it's basic sysadmin stuff, eventually 90% will understand and 10% will ask regardless of what you do, so just embrace yourself for those occasions

>also you should be improving docs, if they are not clear, make them clearer

I've written the docs with a tons review and feedback, this saying comes to mind: "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool"

There are no more sysadmins at most companies, it's just desktop support and maybe Office365 admin who was desktop support but got promoted because they were elite ClickOps. Powershell/Terraform, that's for those DevOps people over there and they want nothing to do with us.

mentioned those 10% sufficiently talented ;)

not sure about US, but here in center of europe we still have sysadmins and not many devoops people

Yeah, but in the center of Europe, customers are very price sensitive so you only target them once you've got adoption in the customers who can pay. Have to industrialize your processes before the cheap people are worth it and that takes time in startups.

Sure very smaller businesses are just cheap, but the rest want to get the most value out of that money spent. Finding and switching to alternatives with better price/performance is pretty normal I'd say.

Yeah, but the practice there is just to select on price, so I'm happy to pre-qual them out.

The quality of the docs doesn't matter if the customer won't read them: "We'll set up a Teams meeting and you can tell us what to do"

The necessary docs are for the SSO system. So while we can build the docs, those UIs change often and without notice, and each customer may see something different, depending on their individual config or permissions. It’s literally impossible to “just provide better docs” consistently without incurring heavy expense… thus the extra cost.

ok, so? this is the exact BS why companies are so up the microsofts ass even though their products are mediocre, you don't have to deal with this stuff

if you want to be competitive, get your sh*t together - this is the reason why nobody wants to bother with alternatives

The systems are also notoriously opaque.

On the level of “I pressed the button and nothing happened.”

Fraught with bottomless wells of silent failure.

There’s inevitably a section of dumping payloads and sometimes that’s one sided.

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