Jaguar stumbles on stairway to Google cloud In October, Google rolled out UK vehicle maker Jaguar Land Rover as a corporate poster child for the much-debated switch to Google Apps, its Microsoft-battling suite of web-based businessware. But according to employees, Jaguar's initial migration from Microsoft Exchange to the so-called Google cloud didn't quite go as planned …
"But let’s all acknowledge that the cloud switch is more complex than some would lead us to believe"
Actually sounds pretty simple if they managed to migrate thousands of users from Exchange to a totally new system with only 1 day or less outage for some number of users (users will whine about everybody having no mail when its just them and their mate from the next desk). I have seen Exchange servers down for longer just with an upgrade or switching spam filtering providers.
I am guessing the IT dept thought it was simple as well; but underestimated what sheer volume can do. Probably ran a trial with 50 users, all went well so though 10,000 accounts would be no different.
Only fail here is not migrating users office by office or dept by dept to deal with training or any scaling issues. Sounds like migrating a few hundred or few thousand users per week would have been a more conservative approach. They must have considered the effect of just transferring mailboxes, each hundreds of MB for thousands of users, would have killed a companies bandwidth.
Assuming the changes happened over the weekend of 5/6th Dec strikes me as a bit dumb really. The could have started it come the weekend of the 19th/20th and given UK PLC does no work from around 15th Dec to 10th Jan, then no one would have really given a flying fig whether their email worked during this period - they'd have either been down the pub or at home with the family...
And yes I appreciate this has impacts on IT staff - Due to circumstances outside my control, I once had to move a whole company on the bank holiday Monday that we got instead of New Year which fell on the Saturday
Well, if you read the article it seems that their "IT department" may be an outsource to a large blue provider of mainframes. A cynic might wonder whether it is in the provider's best interests to ease the transition from expensive outsourced services to a fluffy cloud....
What I am surprised about is that IBM wasn't trying to flog their own (terrible) 'cloud' email service to JLR.
Migration of this many users in a weekend with a relatively small impact is probably not the end of the world.
Howeverrrrr.... IMHO I'm still very wary of 'cloud' based services like this - relying on some internets to get access to your corporate email is like relying on the M25 to get you home. One day it will all come to a grinding halt or near as damnit, and you won't be able to hold Mr Cloud Provider responsible cos of the prevailing conditions of some internets.
but it wasn't really that big a deal. Many of us didn't get our old emails migrated across from Outlook which they had promised us but apart from it taking a long time to log-in everything was ready for me.
Some people weren't able to log-in but this was probably more to do with the JLR Migration away from FORD than the switch to Googlemail.
One bonus which the article failed to mention was we all now have FireFox for use with Googlemail which is a far superior browser to Micro$oft.
Most of the problems I seen were associated with the Migration (or Transition as we call it) and donuts not being able to read the BBC News website due to the increased web traffic.
JLR IT Kicking Bottom on our own!
Working at JLR this week has been a nightmare.
The Helpdesk have 2,000 tickets from 7,000 users left unanswered as of today. Helpdesk wait time this morning was 1hr.
Use is still slow. Can't access it outside work. Offline calanders don't work... The list goes on.
People have not been allowed to migrate their existing emails to Google, and so we now have to run Outlook in offline move at the same time as Google and "copy and paste" info across. I've lost almost 10 years worth of emails!
Also, GoogleMail stinks for corporate use. It $ucks bigtime. I can't organise the emails easily, editing and sending attachments is a nightmare. I can't forward a section of email, but I can add a animated dog turd (complete with flies). Does that tell you something? This is for social networking not corporate Britain.
JLR IT have ben support agents for Ford, and have proved themselves useless in this change. Probably outsourced it to Google as they couldn't set up their own exchange servers!
The MS system worked. GoogleMail it saved £60 per user per year (£2m in 5yrs). That's not a lot really. Most of us would take a £60 p.a. paycut to go back.
We had a system that worked really well, and we want it back!
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