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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Should’ve just paid Microsoft to transition to Office 365. Leave the technology work to tech companies, stick to core competencies.

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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.

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?

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.

Lots of older companies still have subdomains in email, left over from when that was actual machine to route to.

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

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.

I just use that as a disposable email. I know there are better ways, but then with a subdomain, I can just experiment as much as I can.

I would like to believe that I have put the correct measures to prevent a DDOS attack, and it’ll be fun to combat a real time attack honestly

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.

>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>>

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.

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.

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 ;)

You are speaking truth my friend.

I wasn't talking about IBM to be clear. It shouldn't be too hard to connect the dots :) Corporations are morbidly fascinating!

>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.

> 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

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…

MS has always been stronger in B2B. Consumer facing.. well there's been some missteps.

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.

It helps that they build and operate their own IT tools.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110802-00/?p=10...

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).

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.

I call it Office361 because it goes down at least 4 days a year.

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?

Just an anecdote but my experience has been diametrically opposite to yours. My last role was in an office 365 shop and I miss it every single day. Most of the pain in Google-land comes from meet/chat and everything being in the browser.

Not sure why I have the opposite experience. We transitioned from self hosted Exchange to Office 365 and then Teams a few years ago, and I don't even remember a single instance of an outage.

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.

You can now self-fire yourself. Or could be easily "reduced". Congratz mate. Or maybe you are in manager position ?

O, and just wait till global MS365 outage. Or global MS365 emails leak. Or passwords leak or just sell offers on black market...

Also all that thread conflate email systems with "email/messaging/calendaring" packages - that always was corporational level stuff so no serious attempts from open software world.

And maybe you remember Netscape ~4.x had profiles in LDAP ? But, somehow, that fake opensource fundation Mozilla removed it. Why ? Obviously - to trim down competition for budies ! And here we are - "I'm so happy with app via browser!"...

And IBM... n/c...

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.

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.

I believe NTFS has support for 32767 char filenames (but 255 per level), but yes, Windows Explorer does not. Maybe in Win 11?

Yep. IBM is definitely #1 when it comes to selling vapor to clueless top management. For everything else, they should leave it to professionals.

Sick burn of IBM. And a well deserved one.

IBM isn't considered a tech company?

That's the joke

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...

Only novel tech they have been working on that I’m aware of is quantum computers…

Watson ... <snicker>.

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.

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".

IBM 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).

Just been through that, what a disaster! linux users totally screwed

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 'lite web apps' with a fraction of the functionality and performance of the proper app itself.

> [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.

I've used that remote control from the Linux app.

I 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.

It 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

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