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

theregister.com

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

#61

Post by krylon »

outside1234 wrote: post #45
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They support their AS400 line. No one else in the market. This plus some companies they bought (e.g. redhat) is all that IBM is left as today.

They have a 1.8% market share in cloud, to be fair (probably about 99.5% of which is their own usage internally)

It's kind of strange, though, they're not doing better in that department. I remember they launched a cloud-like offering around 2005, hosting customers' applications in multiple globally distributed data centers, with full redundancy, load balancing, etc. I suppose the world wasn't ready for that back then.

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

#62

Post by milankragujevic »

leokennis wrote: post #19
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Should’ve just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave the technology work to tech companies, stick to core competencies.

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…

Same story. We have some weird behavior with Microsoft services but rarely and don't suffer from lack of resources and instability due to inflexible self hosted infrastructure.

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

#63

Post by kiwijamo »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49
Taniwha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just been through that, what a disaster! linux users totally screwed

Doesn't the web version of Outlook work?

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 'lite web apps' with a fraction of the functionality and performance of the proper app itself.

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

#65

Post by mbesto »

cronix wrote: post #6
toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

Should’ve just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave the technology work to tech companies, stick to core competencies.

IBM isn't considered a tech company?

As I've said before in comments here on HN and Twitter, there is no real definition of a "tech company" or "tech industry", the word "tech" defines the operating model. This is the dirty little secret VCs don't like to tell you because it means they can call Tesla a tech company (its a car and battery manufacturer) to fetch tech-like valuations or Facebook a tech company (its a media company). Tech operating models typically net high gross margins (i.e. Facebook) which is one of its major defining characteristics.

I therefore posit there is no such thing as a "tech industry", but rather businesses that sit on a spectrum of operating models from:

- Back office IT supported

- Tech enabled

- Tech Led

Personally I would define IBM as a Diversified IT, IT Services and Software company that is has an operating model that sits somewhere between tech enabled and tech led.

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

#66

Post by kiwijamo »

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.

In many orgs three days of no email would be a serious show stopper. I dare say that if I was CTO of a company that relies on email (which is pretty much the majority of companies) I would be wary of choosing IBM for anything critical from now on.

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

#67

Post by sharkweek »

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 was gonna say - this sounds like a dream week for most.

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

#68

Post by lowbloodsugar »

"We're told that the migration plan followed from IBM's decision in 2018 to sell various software products, including Notes, to India-based HCL Technologies. Following the sale, Big Blue didn't want its data on HCL's servers."

Dear Customers, You can trust HCL, but we don't!

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

#69

Post by syshum »

reaperducer wrote: post #59
throwawayboise wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes more sense anyway. Why should your individual identity be hardwired to your current location or department? If you changed jobs within the company you had to get a new email address and login?

Why should your individual identity be hardwired to your current location or department? When you have a workforce the size of IBM it makes sense. At my last company, with about 300 workers, we had three people with the same first name and last name. Two had the same middle initials. At my current company, pre-pandemic, even though my department was only 50 people, we still had two with the same first, middle, and la…

>At my last company, with about 300 workers, we had three people with the same first name and last name. Two had the same middle initials.

Just assign everyone a salted sha1 hash of their name and employee number as user name and email address

>

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

#70

Post by boardwaalk »

navanchauhan wrote: post #56
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that's just their login, but their email would not have their location sub-domain (I've never seen a sub-domain in e-mail, well actually not true, people with domain + country TLDs all have it, e.g. clarkson@bbc.co.uk). Of course moving locations/departments would mean getting a new login which is all sorts of problematic.

I use pi4.navan.dev for my emails, while I’m getting the rDNS stuff figured out with my ISP. No reason, but it just signifies that the mail server is hosted on my pi4 at my home, while I host navan.dev on a VPS

There’s no reason to do that, though. You can set your MX record to whatever you want for your domain. Why would you set yourself up to have to change your email? Not to mention advertising that your email is on a raspberry pi. Somebody will probably come along and DDOS that thing just for fun.
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