[HN Gopher] IBM's 18-month company-wide email migration has been...
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IBM's 18-month company-wide email migration has been a disaster,
sources say
Author : Dotnaught
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-06-30 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Any IBM-ers here who can comment?
|
| My workplace did a migration from inhouse Exchange to cloud-
| housted Outlook and it was pretty smooth, but you'd expect that
| since it's one Microsoft product to another and probably a
| migration that MS has helped facilitate thousands of times.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Should've just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave
| the technology work to tech companies, stick to core
| competencies.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| IBM isn't considered a tech company?
| spullara wrote:
| They are far more of a services and support company than a
| tech company these days. Their current tech is mostly used by
| their services teams to implement solutions.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/274823/ibms-global-
| reven...
| mbesto wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| That's the joke
| acchow wrote:
| 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".
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Only novel tech they have been working on that I'm aware of
| is quantum computers...
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Watson ... <snicker>.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| > Should've just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365.
| Leave the technology work to tech companies.
|
| It's not as straight forward as that,
|
| Notes can be used as a really good (if designed properly) work
| flow application that has (or had) much more functionallty than
| Outlook. Email is only a part of Notes
|
| I suspect IBM are just realising this
| pgtan wrote:
| 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@<location>.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.
| millzlane wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| 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?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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 last names. They ended up being "1"
| and "2" in their e-mail addresses.
|
| If your company has a large number of first, second, or
| third-generation immigrants from Central or South America
| in it, you run into name collisions all the time.
| syshum wrote:
| >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
|
| <<evil laugh>>
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| 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.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| 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.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| 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
| boardwaalk wrote:
| 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.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Why would you do that?
| bombcar wrote:
| Lots of older companies still have subdomains in email,
| left over from when that was actual machine to route to.
| spondyl wrote:
| The problem is when Microsoft employees are only able to
| consult, don't have access to any systems, no one internally
| seems to own the migration process (or at least appears
| competent at communicating anything) and even worse, the
| majority of it appears to be outsourced to a third party in
| India. Hypothetically of course, no large enterprise would ever
| do such a thing ;)
| sigzero wrote:
| You are speaking truth my friend.
| spondyl wrote:
| I wasn't talking about IBM to be clear. It shouldn't be too
| hard to connect the dots :) Corporations are morbidly
| fascinating!
| VectorLock wrote:
| >the majority of it appears to be outsourced to a third party
| in India
|
| IBM should just be able to run down the block and talk to
| them then.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Just been through that, what a disaster! linux users totally
| screwed
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Doesn't the web version of Outlook work?
| kiwijamo wrote:
| 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.
| folmar wrote:
| > [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.
| leokennis wrote:
| 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...
| milankragujevic wrote:
| 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.
| shadilay wrote:
| MS has always been stronger in B2B. Consumer facing.. well
| there's been some missteps.
| mjcl wrote:
| My experience was that MS understands how IT departments work
| (from small to large) and are fantastic at providing
| resources to customers if it means you'll end up using more
| MS products. At a prior job they paid for a local consulting
| group to configure the Office 365 tenant, connect it with the
| existing on-prem infrastructure and train the staff on
| migrating mailboxes.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It helps that they build and operate their own IT tools.
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110802-00/?p=1
| 0...
| znkynz wrote:
| 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).
| kiwijamo wrote:
| My organisation has used 365 for the last two or so years
| (after migration from Google) and I can't say I've noticed
| much difference in reliability between the two. Google has
| their bad days as well. What in particular have you
| noticed?
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| This is my experience as well since the BPoS days...
|
| Not that it matters. Companies on the Microsoft stack just
| tolerate the outages so they can keep using Microsoft for
| everything.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| I call it Office361 because it goes down at least 4 days a
| year.
| ajross wrote:
| 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
| Office 365. And frankly the competition isn't even close.
|
| I don't love everything about it. But... OMG, it works. It
| just works in my browser and I don't need to do _anything_ to
| get all the features that IT departments for decades were
| only able to make work on their own blessed windows images.
| gumby wrote:
| Sick burn of IBM. And a well deserved one.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Not having working email and calendar is still an improvement
| over Lotus Notes.
| 422long wrote:
| First job out of college used Notes. Hated it.
|
| Since then I've personally declined new work where Notes was the
| standard.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Is this the same as (or based upon) the old Lotus Notes?
|
| Had that at a company where I worked in the 1990s. It was kind
| of new/novel and interesting then. We used it mainly as a
| knowledge base and for internal forums on various subjects.
| IIRC required an OS/2 server to run, which was the only OS/2
| box in the company.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I did a few projects with it, it worked really well but we
| didn't use it for email.
| nradov wrote:
| IBM squired Lotus many years ago and has maintained the Notes
| / Domino product line ever since. The basic architecture has
| never really changed.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I believe HCL actually owns the Lotus software line now. At
| least that's where we go for Sametime and Domino patches
| now...
| etimberg wrote:
| I had the same experience right out of university. After about
| 18 months the company transitioned to Office 365 and everything
| got better. It took forever to finally get rid of Notes because
| so many internal tools had been developed as notes apps and so
| they all had to be rebuilt.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Last workplace used that too, it was pretty much a meme.
| sharkweek wrote:
| _" Minutes after this article was published, an IBM spokesperson
| dictated the company's statement over the phone, presumably
| because email is a bit spotty"_
|
| Condolences to the team. I don't have a particularly strong
| opinion on IBM, but I am getting a chuckle out of all of _waves
| hands around_ this.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's only been three days? I think that's a bit quick and unfair
| to go to the media and complain.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| a3n wrote:
| 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.
| throw7 wrote:
| So a migration from Lotus Notes to what? It wasn't clear to me in
| the article.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Anything involving Notes seems like a dumpster fire. It was so
| bad at a former employer of mine that people actually left the
| company because of it. We used it for email and scheduling (or
| tried to).
| [deleted]
| VectorLock wrote:
| Sounds like an old version of Notes to a new version?
| protomyth wrote:
| to their own servers
|
| _" They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source
| told us. "That's where it broke down."_
| awill wrote:
| It's very unclear. As someone in tech that's the first thing I
| wanted to know. There was mention of their version of Notes
| being EOL. Maybe just upgrading to a new version of Notes?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The actual transition is said to be from servers they sold to
| servers they still own. But they have at least three email
| systems, apparently (Outlook, Notes, and something called Verse
| are all mentioned), and I wonder if this is part of the issue.
| Three email systems could be worse than any one of them?
| disposedtrolley wrote:
| They were beginning to trial Outlook around the time I wrapped
| up there.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| "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!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Did they hire their own consultants to do it?
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Bring back Profs
| hal-employee wrote:
| 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.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Can't imagine hiring IBM to manage any software project if they
| can't even work their own email.
| [deleted]
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| 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.
| krylon wrote:
| They have their mainframes, too. Not a big market, but highly
| lucrative, AFAIK. I read something about the mainframe
| division contributing 10% of their revenue but 25% of their
| profits.
| outside1234 wrote:
| They have a 1.8% market share in cloud, to be fair
|
| (probably about 99.5% of which is their own usage internally)
| krylon wrote:
| 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.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| Rather, I would not buy a software product from them or accept
| any project that depended on one since they eventually will
| sell it to some smaller company to dump it, apparently even
| when they still need it themselves.
|
| Reminds me of this recent thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517846
| outside1234 wrote:
| IBM getting the IBM treatment
| anon43534908 wrote:
| I worked at a large European tech company (~10k employees) that
| was a big user of Notes, Sametime, Domino, etc. While we left a
| few workflows in Notes, the overall transition to Outlook for
| email and scheduling was largely painless for the end user. I
| hope IBM recovers soon. I wouldn't wish this level of corporate
| hell on my worst enemy.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Heck they still use Notes ... why ???.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| So just the usual standard of IBM work I suppose?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| At least they maintain the reputation: nobody ever got fired
| for buying IBM because the termination email didn't come
| through.
| throwaway-ibm wrote:
| 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 days, so
| I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I was gonna say - this sounds like a dream week for most.
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