IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#101

Post by verst » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

throwaway-ibm wrote: post #51

IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks). Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years , but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts. To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 d…

Migration from Lotus Notes is always horrible. In 2011 I worked on many migrations to Google Apps for Business (GSuite, Google for Work etc) and there was only one person in all of Google who understood Lotus Notes and could maintain the migration tool he had created.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#102

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #83

VectorLock wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The problem is we are late getting off the version that becomes unsupported tomorrow.”

Yep. Double whammy on the old upgrade meter.

Yeah. I read that and said "Why would I ever hire a consulting company that can't even properly time and prioritize their own upgrades?"

This is literally what people pay them for!

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#103

Post by LeftHandPath » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:10 AM UTC

a3n wrote: post #80

From the comments: > These guys were important once, right? I don't think I'm old enough to remember such a time. I thought they were a law firm for a while because they only seemed to be mentioned in court cases. Ouch.

Its funny how differently people probably perceive them based on what tech they work with. At work, I use their IBM i / AS400 on the daily. At school, I work with IBM Q for research. I would contend that IBM is one of the most important players in QC / NISQ today, and still notable for their mainframes and things like zOS. And what about RHEL?

According to their Q4-FY2020 earnings report, they did $2.5bn in revenue from their systems segment last year (which includes IBM Z, Power, and OS's). But their most important segments are Global Technology Services ($6.6bn revenue) and "Cloud & Cognitive Software Segment" ($6.8bn revenue). GTS is cloud infrastructure + support, while C&CSS includes "Cloud & Data Platforms", "Cognitive Applications", and transactions processing platforms...

I'm not sure what exposure the commenter has had to IBM, but it's a bit of a culture shock to hear someone saying they're not important.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#104

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

failwhaleshark wrote: post #89

908B64B197 wrote: post #72

Did they hire their own consultants to do it?

It definitely wasn't a Coyote Creek migration. Christ, pay me $10M and I'll bring an army of 30 geeks to turnaround this landfill fire. I did a startup that M&A'ed organization email providers of all sorts (Exchange, postfix, sendmail, etc.) to aggregate them for efficiencies at scale. 1. Tested and complete backups 2. Sample testing 3. mbox migrations 4. Exceptions handling 5. Further testing 6. Cutover

Yes, but you presumably hire people who are good at their jobs.

IBM hires... bodies.

And I'd imagine internal IBM IT is... anyone they can't use to bill a customer with.

Ouch.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#105

Post by perryizgr8 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #31

It's only been three days? I think that's a bit quick and unfair to go to the media and complain.

Email broken for 3 hours is a serious incident. When everything is down, and the servers are on fire, I still expect email to work.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#106

Post by tyingq » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

The longer it's down, the more incoming stuff piles up into various SMTP queues. So they are running from an increasingly larger avalanche.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#107

Post by fomine3 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

They need big fix

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#108

Post by perryizgr8 » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

znkynz wrote: post #33

leokennis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you’re sarcastic or not, but my company (enterprise size) has migrated from self hosted Exchange + network file shares + GitLab + Jenkins + Artifactory + 1000 other things to Office 365 + Azure and it’s been great. Probably took a lot more effort than what I notice as an end user…but I do get the impression that Microsoft is pretty good in enterprise productivity…

Office365 as a platform appears to suffer from terrible unreliability. My last role was in a google apps shop, and i miss it every single day. (it's been 3 years).

Just an anecdote but my experience has been diametrically opposite to yours. My last role was in an office 365 shop and I miss it every single day. Most of the pain in Google-land comes from meet/chat and everything being in the browser.

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#109

Post by jhgb » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

throwaway-ibm wrote: post #51

IBM-er here. yep, it's kinda a disaster, but tech savvy people can access their mail (clearing cache & cookies every few hours helps for some folks). Funny thing, IBM tried to move to Exchange for years , but it failed every time. Turns out, calendar integration (between Exchange and Verse/Notes) is tricky. Especially if you have to do it for 300000 accounts. To be frank, I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 d…

> I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 days, so I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration.

Task failed successfully?

Re: IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources

#110

Post by ehayes » Thu, Jul 01, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #86

Does this affect the part of IBM that used to be Red Hat? When I was at RH as recently as 2017, email was an absolutely essential part of most workflows. It was all pretty crappy and last-century - don't even get me started on bugzilla being similarly essential - but it did work.

Former Red Hatter wondering the same thing. RH was transitioning to Gmail right as I was onboarding. I never really used the previous system which I think was Zimbra iirc.