13 ms·
IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster: sources
- throwawayboise 5y agoAny 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 5y agoShould’ve just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave the technology work to tech companies, stick to core competencies.
- cronix 5y agoIBM isn't considered a tech company?
- dharmab 5y agoThat's the joke
- spullara 5y agoThey 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-revenue-by-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274823/ibms-global-reven...
- gogopuppygogo 5y agoOnly novel tech they have been working on that I’m aware of is quantum computers…
- tibbydudeza 5y agoWatson ... <snicker>.
- mbesto 5y agoAs 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.
- acchow 5y agoIt'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".
- mbrodersen 5y agoIBM is a consulting company. Only IBM Research and their mainframe division do anything interesting in tech. And their research division seems to be mainly there for marketing/image purposes (helping consultants sell overpriced “solutions” to clueless top management).
- 123pie123 5y ago> 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 5y agoHa! 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.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThat 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?
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoMy 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.
- bombcar 5y agoLots of older companies still have subdomains in email, left over from when that was actual machine to route to.
- navanchauhan 5y agoI 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 5y agoThere’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.
- spondyl 5y agoThe 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 5y agoYou are speaking truth my friend.
- spondyl 5y agoI wasn't talking about IBM to be clear. It shouldn't be too hard to connect the dots :) Corporations are morbidly fascinating!
- VectorLock 5y ago>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.
- leokennis 5y agoNot 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…
- shadilay 5y agoMS has always been stronger in B2B. Consumer facing.. well there's been some missteps.
- mjcl 5y agoMy 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 5y agoIt helps that they build and operate their own IT tools. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110802-00/?p=10003 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110802-00/?p=10...
- znkynz 5y agoOffice365 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).
- gogopuppygogo 5y agoThis 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.
- Taniwha 5y agoJust been through that, what a disaster! linux users totally screwed
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoDoesn't the web version of Outlook work?
- kiwijamo 5y agoIt'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 5y ago> [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.
- anoncake 5y agoI've used that remote control from the Linux app.
- gramie 5y agoI use Teams on a Mac. Every day or two the chat window randomly disappears and it stops displaying notifications. If I don't notice I sometimes go more than a day before I realize that it's dead and restart Teams to fix the problem.
- Taniwha 5y agoIt doesn't effectively replace or integrate into the much more serviceable linux client where I read all my work email AND all my other email
- gumby 5y agoSick burn of IBM. And a well deserved one.
- robotnikman 5y agoAt 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.
- Tempest1981 5y agoI believe NTFS has support for 32767 char filenames (but 255 per level), but yes, Windows Explorer does not. Maybe in Win 11?
- mbrodersen 5y agoYep. IBM is definitely #1 when it comes to selling vapor to clueless top management. For everything else, they should leave it to professionals.
- 422long 5y agoFirst job out of college used Notes. Hated it. Since then I've personally declined new work where Notes was the standard.
- throwawayboise 5y agoIs 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.
- nradov 5y agoIBM squired Lotus many years ago and has maintained the Notes / Domino product line ever since. The basic architecture has never really changed.
- thrower123 5y agoI believe HCL actually owns the Lotus software line now. At least that's where we go for Sametime and Domino patches now...
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI did a few projects with it, it worked really well but we didn’t use it for email.
- etimberg 5y agoI 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_ 5y agoLast workplace used that too, it was pretty much a meme.
- throw7 5y agoSo a migration from Lotus Notes to what? It wasn't clear to me in the article.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VectorLock 5y agoSounds like an old version of Notes to a new version?
- protomyth 5y agoto their own servers "They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source told us. "That's where it broke down."
- VectorLock 5y ago“The problem is we are late getting off the version that becomes unsupported tomorrow.”
- awill 5y agoIt'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?
- spoonjim 5y agoCan't imagine hiring IBM to manage any software project if they can't even work their own email.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gogopuppygogo 5y agoThey 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.
- outside1234 5y agoThey have a 1.8% market share in cloud, to be fair (probably about 99.5% of which is their own usage internally)
- krylon 5y agoIt'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.
- krylon 5y agoThey 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.
- foolmeonce 5y agoRather, 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517846
- MattGaiser 5y agoSo just the usual standard of IBM work I suppose?
- mkr-hn 5y agoAt least they maintain the reputation: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM because the termination email didn't come through.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoMaybe IBM should hire one of those big IT companies that specialises in consultancy and service design.
- quantified 5y agoWhich would likely lead to exactly this outcome?
- soco 5y agoBig IT company which specializes in yada yada here. We did years ago our own migration away from Notes (>100k accounts), and also for customers. Painful? Probably. But it can be done.
- sharkweek 5y ago"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 5y agoIt's only been three days? I think that's a bit quick and unfair to go to the media and complain.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kiwijamo 5y agoIn 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.
- jlawer 5y agoEmail broken for 3 days an no rollback / plan B?
- quantified 5y agoIf they were running your systems for you, how many days would it take for you to say something in a public fashion (a tweet, for example)? Give them a week, maybe?
- perryizgr8 5y agoEmail broken for 3 hours is a serious incident. When everything is down, and the servers are on fire, I still expect email to work.
- outside1234 5y agoIBM getting the IBM treatment
- anon43534908 5y agoI 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 5y agoHeck they still use Notes ... why ???.
- throwaway-ibm 5y agoIBM-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 5y agoI was gonna say - this sounds like a dream week for most.
- albatross13 5y agoHilariously enough, I imagine people are getting more done this week :laugh_cry_emoji:
- verst 5y agoMigration 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.
- samus 5y agoAnd every time a big user moves away from Lotus Notes (and other such dinosaurs, such as Cobol), it gets harder as this knowledge becomes more niche. The people doing it spend the rest of their career at that combany and that's it.
- jhgb 5y ago> I haven't received any meeting invites in 3 days, so I'm actually quite satisfied with the migration. Task failed successfully?
- mlboss 5y ago
- oldgradstudent 5y agoNot having working email and calendar is still an improvement over Lotus Notes.
- busymom0 5y agoRelevant 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 who works for your "competition" in that field the product just seems like an embarrassment." to which they replied: "Actually... I rarely use Lotus Notes... I've been using Verse. All my email is in my browser now! - Richard." https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_of_developers_from_ibm_ask_us/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ilzey/were_a_bunch_o...
- fulafel 5y agoIt 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?
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago"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 5y agoDid they hire their own consultants to do it?
- failwhaleshark 5y agoIt 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
- ethbr0 5y agoYes, 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.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI wouldn't let excellent internal IT to do a massive, specialized, critical migration because of the finger-pointing risks and pressure to fire should there be an unforeseen, unmitigated problem. When something is as mission-critical as email, use a lifeline and phone a consultant who does this regularly. IBM should use this crisis as an opportunity to fire horrible IT resources, e.g., managers and staff.
- sys_64738 5y agoBring back Profs
- hal-employee 5y agoIBM 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.
- a3n 5y agoFrom 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.
- LeftHandPath 5y agoIts 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.
- tibbetts 5y agoI’m 41, and know all those things, and my father’s company ran for most of my life on AS/400. But they replaced those systems over a decade ago. My whole professional career IBM has been trying to commit corporate suicide in a stumbling awkward way. It’s a testament to how long you can keep spending down brand credibility. I struggle to call them important today. Maybe historically interesting. But not important.
- notacoward 5y agoDoes 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.
- allyourhorses 5y agoPresumably they're at least 15 years away from integrating their email after the merger, going by typical dinosaur corp schedules
- ehayes 5y agoFormer 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.
- robszumski 5y agoRed Hat is all gsuite and runs all of its own systems like HR, etc.
- sweettea 5y agoNo. We have Gmail-for-workspaces. -current red hatter.
- Havoc 5y agoThey phoned the statement in?? And nobody thought that would just serve to confirm it’s a mess while giving the reader a chuckle?
- quantified 5y agoThe fax machine is down too, I guess.
- thrower123 5y agoIBM has a major Slack outage at least once a week for most of this year. I don't know really whether it's a Slack problem, or an IBM problem, or if trying to split off Kyndryl at the same time is just too much, but it's always having rolling outages.
- projectManager 5y agoI am an ibmer and dont see a slack outtage every week let's get back to work and do well for our company instead of speculating, sharing anecdotes. Hey, you have IBM stock, probably. Do you want it to be worth anything?
- tyingq 5y agoThe longer it's down, the more incoming stuff piles up into various SMTP queues. So they are running from an increasingly larger avalanche.
- fomine3 5y agoThey need big fix
- myrandomcomment 5y agoThey should go back to OfficeVison (PROFS). That always worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_OfficeVision#Earlier_PROFS,_DISOSS_and_Office/36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_OfficeVision#Earlier_PROFS...
- denkmoon 5y agoThis 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.
- watersb 5y agoHow 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.
- sunil2020 5y agoUnmitigated disaster. Come to think of it, this disaster strikes at the quarter end. I am pretty sure that quite a few contracts would have slipped.
- sunil2020 5y agoAS an ex-IBMer, I can tell you that there are hundreds of thousands who are directly affected but most of them would be frustrated but not overly concerned. Like in a government, they will end up making a scapegoat out of a few minions but the leadership will remain unscathed. It’s an organisation where everyone is responsible but none would be Accountable.
- sidcool 5y agoHas anyone here used IBM's cloud offerings? Especially their K8s service. How's the experience been?
- projectManager 5y agoTo any IBMers commenting - why would you shoot your own company in the foot? Yes people are suffering and trying to get by. Yes there are great and not so great people, in any company. It's a big migration and someone f*ed up. Do you really want to hurt stock prices, and the company by blowing off steam about it? Get back to work!!!!