IBM's 18-Month Company-Wide Email System Migration Has Been a Disaster
Published on July 01, 2021 at 05:32AM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days. Current and former IBMers have confirmed to The Register that the migration, 18 months in the making, has been a disaster. We've been told that email service has been intermittent for the past four or five days, and not everyone has been affected in the same way. Lack of access has been shorter for some -- one source told us email was back after two days of downtime. Slack is said to be working though Outlook, Verse (IBM's webmail), and Notes have been unreliable. "Outlook won't work with the new system, IBM Notes won't work and the online email called Verse has now gone down," a tipster told us. "Everyone has been affected and no fix is in sight." One source we spoke with laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh for cutting costs and not hiring the right people. Over the weekend, a source told us, a blog post to IBM's internal network w3 said the migration had been planned for 18 months and that everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them. Evidently, this did not happen. Since then, a banner has gone up on w3 pointing people to a Slack channel for updates on the situation, and IBM's CIO has posted a note to employees addressing the problems. Presently, the w3 status page returns an error. 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. "They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source told us. "That's where it broke down." There's also concern that "disappeared messages may not be restored," says The Register. "We've even heard that IBM employees have been approached by recruiters posing questions like, 'Why are you still at IBM? They can't even get email straight.'"
Published on July 01, 2021 at 05:32AM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days. Current and former IBMers have confirmed to The Register that the migration, 18 months in the making, has been a disaster. We've been told that email service has been intermittent for the past four or five days, and not everyone has been affected in the same way. Lack of access has been shorter for some -- one source told us email was back after two days of downtime. Slack is said to be working though Outlook, Verse (IBM's webmail), and Notes have been unreliable. "Outlook won't work with the new system, IBM Notes won't work and the online email called Verse has now gone down," a tipster told us. "Everyone has been affected and no fix is in sight." One source we spoke with laid the blame on IBM CFO James Kavanaugh for cutting costs and not hiring the right people. Over the weekend, a source told us, a blog post to IBM's internal network w3 said the migration had been planned for 18 months and that everything should go fine provided everyone follows the instructions emailed to them. Evidently, this did not happen. Since then, a banner has gone up on w3 pointing people to a Slack channel for updates on the situation, and IBM's CIO has posted a note to employees addressing the problems. Presently, the w3 status page returns an error. 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. "They were transitioning to IBM-owned servers," one source told us. "That's where it broke down." There's also concern that "disappeared messages may not be restored," says The Register. "We've even heard that IBM employees have been approached by recruiters posing questions like, 'Why are you still at IBM? They can't even get email straight.'"
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