Michael Howell

Leaving Microsoft Exchange for Google

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:31:11 -0700

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written, but we did something at work recently that I wanted to let people know about ... we turned off our Microsoft exchange server.

Since I got into the technology business several years ago, Microsoft exchange and Outlook have been good friends to me. Aside from that annoying paperclip in the nineties, Microsoft Outlook looked after my emails with care and diligence. But the past couple of years as so many services have moved to hosted (a.k.a cloud or ASP) solutions, the importance of desktop computing has diminished.

And, as desktop computing retracts, so do so many of the headaches technology professionals manage through on a daily basis. Reducing the noise of desktop issues while improving central management of time sucks like document retention and discovery allows us to focus our time on more strategic activities.

Our former Exchange provider rarely went down and their customer service was decent, but the strategic advantage of Google Apps marketplace and cost benefits made it an easier decision. We will save 58% by making the move and pick up some extra services along the way.

For smaller companies I think Google Apps is a great option, at $50 a year per account and 25 GB of storage you can run your business easily. With the addition of Google Voice, Google is positioning itself as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Communication, Exchange, Sharepoint servers and the Office suite. Google has a long way to go to displace all of these, but with the progress they’ve made in the last couple of years and their head start as a pure cloud offering, I think Google will be a force to recon with in the mid-market very soon.

Our migration to Google Apps was fairly simple, we completed it on a Monday afternoon, but as many know it’s the change management process that is daunting. We gained more confidence as the go-live date approached and as we ran through the tests and trained our users. Our employees took the changes in stride and solved several issues on their own because most already had gmail accounts.

There are several differences and nuances between Microsoft Outlook and Google Apps. A few things we learned along the way are below:

1.) If you have more than 100 users, use the Exchange migration tool, if fewer than 100 use the Outlook Synch tool individually (We migrated about 55). If you’re with a hosted Exchange provider, you may be stuck with the latter since they won’t be much help to you since you need administrator access to run the Exchange scripts.

2.) If you use the Outlook Synch tool, make sure all the host machines are patched to Google’s specifications. The tool has poor error logging, so its difficult to know why it doesn’t work, but in every case we got an error, it was due to Office or the OS not having the right service pack.

3.) Give yourself plenty of time to migrate emails. We had a T1 line, so large OST or PST files took some time. On average it took 2 hours for a 1GB PST, but this varies depending on your bandwidth.

4.) Migrate your .OST files first and then PST’s. I would suggest migrating the PST’s after the go-live since users can still use Outlook to find old emails.

5.) Google calendar and Outlook don’t exactly work well together. When sending an outlook invite, Google Apps will not display the calendar body. For now, we add an attachment if a detailed invite is necessary.

6.) Postini is a great filtering service, but you have to make changes to your MX and SPF records to ensure Postini receives all your emails first. These changes will supersede the MX record changes you made to route emails to Google Apps for go-live.

Overall, I’m very happy with Google Apps. Having all of our messaging tools in one place is great. Google is continuously improving their platform and releasing new features to fill gaps with Microsofts products, minus the paperclip....

Great Business Teams

Sun, 2 Aug 2009 06:13:02 -0700

Great Business Teams by Howard Guttman is an informative book to a set of principles Howard and his team have documented over the years that lead to forming high performing teams. Most of the tenets are based on leadership skills and individual accountability that equate to honest unfiltered feedback to teams and leadership within an organization. Guttman’s quote of “getting comfortable with discomfort” is the basis for making teams great.

He argues that teams performance deteriorates when conflict festers and disagreements are brought out into the open in an unemotional factitious approach (easier said than done).

Thinking about my own experiences I would have to agree that once the emotional uncomfortable nature of a conflict is broken down and you are able to let someone know what your thoughts are, there tends to be better results moving forward.

The alternative is having people talk about others and not to them and we all know how damaging that can be to teams.

I would recommend the book as a guide to help with team interaction. My only criticism is the examples and studies tend to be a little too straight forward and clear cut, where little attention is paid to the politics and company culture. But overall a good read.

Enterprise Social Networking (Collaboration)

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:18:35 -0700

Our company recently went through some changes within the marketing group and a new consultant has been putting together a communications strategy for our internal departments. She has proposed we begin using a social networking style of intranet to promote inner-department communication as well as serve as an enterprise knowledge base system.

I really like the approach as it employs the communication strategy of a social network, but at the same time builds a knowledge base system for the enterprise.

Microsoft seems to get this theory as it has moved toward this approach with its wave 14 release due our next year. Wave 14 is Microsoft's next generation Office and Sharepoint technologies merged to provide corporations insight and network knowledge as it grows.

For example, employees can join their teams in documenting status of projects, meeting notes and Q&A discussions within the project wiki. Additionally, employees can keep a blog of their ideas or interests so interested employees can subscribe to RSS feeds. Instant messenger can be integrated along with enterprise search to bring all the employees together.

I think the bottom line is it depends on what type of culture your company has. If it’s open and generally works as a cohesive unit, the social networking software would probably fit right in. if on the other hand your company is more closed and let’s just say inter departmental communication is a challenge (think silos), then it may be some time before you twitter about something going on at work...

Wharton Healthcare Business Conference

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:35:42 -0800

I attended the Wharton healthcare conference last week and I have to say I came away with a little spring in my step. The conferences I usually go to are pretty dry and uninspiring, but Wharton’s was different. Don’t get me wrong, the keynote presenters were CEO’s using their same presentations as they use for Wall Street analysts, but what I found more interesting was the breakout sessions around the future of EMR’s and the new administrations plans on spending a tremendous amount of money on Healthcare IT.

One presenter in particular, Ronald Paulus, gave a very insightful presentation on how the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania has turned patient care on its ear by treating people (not patients) not only when they’re ill, but after they have recovered so they don’t end up at the hospital again. The best way I can describe it is like having a permanent project manager assigned to you throughout your life and is there to be your conscience and guide for navigating the Geisinger Health System through thick and thin.

In addition to the non-keynote speakers, the attendees I interacted with were very excited about health care IT and its direction given this administrations outlook on health care. I was lucky enough to meet several of the Wharton health care students and was inspired by their energy to tackle health care related issues.

I look forward to the next several months within health care IT and what the Obama administration unveils as it’s plan for spending the $19B it has set aside. My hope is it is put to good use and not wasted on failed software projects that we have come to expect 66% of the time.

Software Licensing Audits

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 18:25:19 -0800

Ah, the software audit. Well take it from first hand knowledge, software audits are a revenue producing entity. As one of the executives to have gone through a few and ended up on the short end of the stick I can tell you its not personal, but strictly business (insert your favorite mob movie scene here). I have a few tips for dealing with them.

• First, of course, get ahead of the situation. Start looking into your software compliance now. There are several reasonable tools on the market that will “crawl” your servers to inventory your software installations. The most difficult aspect is deciphering the types of software you are licensed for versus what is installed. You may have several licenses for a standard version, but the enterprise version is installed everywhere.

• If you are contacted for an audit, don’t shlep it off on a poor production support manager. Take it serious and get your legal department involved. You will be accountable in the end and should drive the audit rather than being a victim.

• Be aware of virtual environments and the hazards that follow. If you moved to a virtual environment and do not know the license impact, read the agreement clearly. Since virtualization software allows servers to move around on separate physical servers, the vendor may require all to be under license even though they only use one resource at a time.

• Do not provide any more information than asked (now I sound like a lawyer). The audit will most likely be conducted by a third party (KPMG), so don’t feel you need to keep a relationship with them. Be direct to the point and keep it short.

• If you think you’re out of compliance, get in compliance as soon as possible. Once you are contacted, you generally have time to get your house in order. Keep in mind some software agreements allow the vendor to audit change management logs, so be aware.

• Finally, keep your executive team in the loop and let them know the risks and the business impacts to getting into compliance. Also let them know that even the best efforts to get into compliance can be submarined by vague licensing language. So prep them to grow a backbone if it comes down to disputing with the vendor.