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

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121–130 of 155 posts

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

#121

This is a tragedy. How will we all access the torrents of corporate spam?! My managers have been running around like headless chickens. Great spectator sport.

How will we all access the torrents of corporate spam?!

A good while ago, I may or may not have heard from someone who had registered a domain name like "foo.bar"... a placeholder sort of name, a valid domain. Got the impression that lots of IBMer email was mostly about golf.

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

#122
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.

> Ouch.

Yes, that is such a complete misunderstanding on what IBM does that it hurts. IBM is a huge corporation close to be 100 years old that still is one one of the most innovatives in the world.

"In 2020, IBM topped the list of patent recipients for the 28th consecutive year with 9,130 patents, while Samsung Electronics Co. was second with 6,415. IBM received the most patents in three of the 10 fastest growing fields in technology -- quantum computers, machine learning and computer systems using neural networks that imitate how the human brain works, according to a recent study by Fairview Research’s IFI Claims Patent Services." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-12/ibm-s-pat...

Google Gross revenue: $161.85 billion. IBM Gross revenue: $73.62 billion. Twitter revenue: $3.72 billion

IBM does not dominate the cultural landscape like Google or Facebook do. But, it is a robust company that has stand the test of time.

It would be like laughing at Akamai or Incapsula because nobody talks about them on the general media.

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

#123
post #47

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…

That's where I am too. We've been moving to 365 over the past year, and during the pandemic I finally cut the cord to the old technology (corporate IMAP/SMTP which I then glue up with clients myself). And... sorry everyone, but BY FAR the best, cleanest, most performant and reliable work-provided email/messaging/calendaring solution I've had during my almost 2.5 decades of being a full time Linux user is... Microsoft…

You can now self-fire yourself. Or could be easily "reduced". Congratz mate. Or maybe you are in manager position ?

O, and just wait till global MS365 outage. Or global MS365 emails leak. Or passwords leak or just sell offers on black market...

Also all that thread conflate email systems with "email/messaging/calendaring" packages - that always was corporational level stuff so no serious attempts from open software world.

And maybe you remember Netscape ~4.x had profiles in LDAP ? But, somehow, that fake opensource fundation Mozilla removed it. Why ? Obviously - to trim down competition for budies ! And here we are - "I'm so happy with app via browser!"...

And IBM... n/c...

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

#125

Not having working email and calendar is still an improvement over Lotus Notes.

Relevant AMA from IBM developers which some questions didn't go as well as they expected: > What is the worst piece of software you've worked on and why is it Lotus Notes? > Why does Lotus Notes always crash? And why does IBM package Lotus Notes with utilities to terminate and clean up Lotus Notes, instead of just fixing Lotus Notes in the first place? > "Why is Lotus Notes still a thing? Seriously though, as someone…

It would be interesting to hear the theory of what happened between developing the interesting engine tech under the hood, suitable for flexible collaboration and active databases, and end user riots. Was it that marketing had to decide between promoting the bundled mail/calendar apps and promoting it as a custom app platform, and latter withered away?

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

#126

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…

As a RH'er who has started to see a creep in contact coming from IBM'ers the past few days have been very peaceful.

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

#127

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…

> IBM-er here.

What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues.

I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

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

#128
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.

> Ouch. Yes, that is such a complete misunderstanding on what IBM does that it hurts. IBM is a huge corporation close to be 100 years old that still is one one of the most innovatives in the world. "In 2020, IBM topped the list of patent recipients for the 28th consecutive year with 9,130 patents, while Samsung Electronics Co. was second with 6,415. IBM received the most patents in three of the 10 fastest growing fie…

The data about patent filing does not support your claim about innovation.

IBM literally optimizes for the patent filing metric (and others generally do not), and that metric is not at all correlated to "innovation".

Most people would also likely argue that data would not support your claim about robustness either.

The graph of IBM's revenue over the past few decades does not tell a happy story: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265003/ibms-revenue-sinc...

It doesn't get better if you go further back. IBM has the same revenue now that it did in 1996.

Robust usually means strong and vigorous. I think it would be a challenge to find someone who believes the past decade at IBM has been that, particularly the Rometty era (IE 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline)

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

#129
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite as good as the native app on Windows/macOS. I definitely prefer the latter so I would be quite disappointed. About the only app that offers a equivalent experience between web and app versions is Teams (seeing as it's just a JS app running more or less the same code as the web version so it performs just as poorly in the web browser as in the app). All the other apps like Outlook etc have what I call '…

> [Teams] offers a equivalent experience between web and app versions Not really, but you only can know if both parties are using Windows. Then there is remote control in screen sharing.

I've used that remote control from the Linux app.

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

#130

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…

> IBM-er here. What do you think that it is the level of competence of people at IBM? For what I read here in Hacker News, it would seem that you have very incompetent colleagues. I am old enough to remember IBM with certain sympathy/nostalgia and I hope that the situation is not so dire.

ex-IBMer here.

I was at IBM research (as an engineer), and thankfully I can say most of my direct colleagues were great and highly competent

...when it came to actual research. I think we had a good engineering core team too, but whenever we had to interact with "big IBM" (outside research) we mostly bumped into incompetent people, and career(money)-focused managers.

Fun fact, due incompetent management 90%+ of my team left in the past 5 years.

Since then I had to work with other IBMers (both engineers and managers/team leads) on different projects and although some of them I'd consider knowledgeable, none of the engineers were able to create high quality output.

But I guess this is the same in any monstrously huge organizations.

I would have been surprised if IBM could tackle such a complicated engineering problem like this migration.

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