Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 155 posts

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

#71

Post by acchow »

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?

It's my understanding that they are largely a consultancy now, helping their clients move things onto their cloud products. I imagine there is quite a bit of vendor lock-in. Seeing as the need for cloud migration is ever-growing in every single industry, I don't see IBM becoming totally irrelevant any time soon. But they are definitely past "Day 1".

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

#74

Post by folmar »

kiwijamo wrote: post #63
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

> [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.

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

#76

Post by millzlane »

pgtan wrote: post #10
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.

Ha! I saw a very big multinational F500 company completely reorganize its AD, because users were unable to login to Office 365 with their standard accounts user@ .company.com. After weeks of complete disasters the company decided to switch to user@company.com just for O365. It's a hard life as microserf.

Same thing happened at one of the largest employers in the state. They have several entities all with different domains. Now everyone's login is different from their email domain. Even though no matter which domain you use in the To: field, It will still be routed properly.

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

#77

Post by robotnikman »

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.

At my previous company I administered a Microsoft 365 setup shortly after they switched over from an on premises AD setup with mixed results.

One bug which stuck out was trying to sync sharepoint directories with a length of over 255 characters locally on a windows machine with onedrive.

In Sharepoint you could create such directories and put files in them no problem through the webapp, but try to open a spreadsheet from the directory within windows file explorer and it would fail to open due to windows 255 character path limit.

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

#78

Post by hal-employee »

IBM offered Exchange as a choice at least 3 years ago but most people just don’t want to change. More than half of my colleagues are still using Notes Client just for Email, which is strange enough because Notes is too freaking heavy for just doing emails.

I’ve migrated to Exchange when it’s still under pilot. But the offer is not available now, I guess the reason is that too few employees choose this option.

Sometimes it’s not really about tech. IBM has decent technology, even in Cloud field, but it’s hard to pivot for a company in this size.

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

#79

Post by banana_giraffe »

throwawayboise wrote: post #28
pgtan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I saw a very big multinational F500 company completely reorganize its AD, because users were unable to login to Office 365 with their standard accounts user@ .company.com. After weeks of complete disasters the company decided to switch to user@company.com just for O365. It's a hard life as microserf.

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?

A company I worked for did that. Not really for geo-location reasons, but brand ones. People that worked for foobar got a @foobar address, and barfoo people got @barfoo. It was all owned by the same company, but the companies that got bought up kept their brands alive, and this was part of it.

I bounced around divisions, so I kept getting new logins. The old emails would forward to the new ones, but the logins would be sunsetted out as I no longer needed access to old projects. I actually don't know how the backend works, other than every time I need some permissions or something fixed, invariable the IT people get very confused by the mess, whatever it is.

Post reply on HN