Email, and Email Services, are not a Commodity

Do you think Email is a commodity, but SMTP service is not? If you think it is, have you planned for what happens when your primary mail service, including SMTP goes down?

I doubt it, because most people do not even realize how email is broken down into parts that only a small bit are the responsibility of your own IT team.

When you have in house email, everything, except the ISP providing your bandwidth, is your own world. You break it, you fix it. You do, or do not, plan for business interruptions. Maybe you have a secondary ISP, even if it is some lousy DSL line, you have something, anything. You do, right?

What about when you get to cloud apps and you have a LDAP in one service or server, your app on one server, your mail transport on another, mobile site on another, your company website on yet another one.

When any of those parts fail, most of the rest fails and you have zero capability to resolve it. Zero. You are at the mercy of whatever Cloud provider, Host facility, kid with an iPhone controlling your VMs and whenever they get around to fixing your problem they will.

Utility? Commodity? Sure, but so are cars, yet many people will not drive a (fill in the blank for your country) because of the lousy service record or safety. Why is your Cloud provider any different.

You may ask about clustering, fail over, etc.. but that does mean you will get an answer that makes sense to you or to them sometimes.

Email is still the #1 business tool because so many rely on it. Do they have to rely on it? Not at all, but they have not made the leap yet to extended applications that notify via other methods. Maybe they did take the leap, but our customers have not yet. The customers expect to be able to interact with us through an old medium which is so easy even the term used, SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, makes it sound easy. Can you plan for every contingency? No, sometimes stuff really happens you can not work around easily. But if you believe all your IT services are just commodities, then you will get what you pay for and should not expect better.

Running a mail server, and related services is not so simple and takes people that truly understand what they are looking at when they get RFC codes in reply and other "errors" as users report them.

I know, I have been doing it for 20 years, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Novell and so many long gone that it is hard to really believe anyone when they say they have a new email app. Email is an app, a huge one, and though you may argue it should just do email, we both know it does so much more and can do so much more. The problem is when the other services, which most people take for granted, stop working and your commodity or utility is unable to do anything.

Makes for a really different work day. or maybe you should spend the time thinking about how to get off the email drug and move to a better way to work.

Fud Buster Friday #37 - Exchange 2010 is Going to Kill Domino

While perusing InfoWorld magazine this week I came across an amazing piece of fluffy reporting from someone who should be able to do better.

His quote

Reliability has improved in Exchange 2010

Damn well hope so! One of our clients who we are migrating from Exchange report failures monthly if not weekly. Conversely my Domino servers stay up until I down them for upgrades(OS,Domino,Java etc.) once a quarter.

So aside from the great title, "First look: Exchange 2010 beta shines", what is so great?

First, Support for Windows Server 2003 is dropped in favor of Windows Server 2008 only. Okay, so we will see more push to move up to Windows 2008.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) will finally be ported to work with Safari and Firefox. Nice, iNotes and DWA under Domino has had it for some time, in various iterations(yes I know version specific, but at least it exists today).

Voice Mail Previews? OK, it provides a speech to text way to read your voice mail. Hmm, so why send the vmail at all as an attachment? Google just showed this recently. Nice piece actually, I hate listening to vmails and my phone doesn't play them so this I would like to see in Domino.

Users can create server distribution lists. WOW! And to think users had that capability, with proper security in place since version 1 of Lotus Notes. Welcome to the security world Microsoft.

Managers can search other employees mail files. With approved security. I hope so!

And they could not do it now because? Microsoft saw no reason to let you do it. Only Admins could search across mail files.

"The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) allows users to control their own server settings. Changing a user's mobile phone number in the global address list used to require a help desk call." It does? Really? Granular security coming to Microsoft finally. Thanks Ray for adding Lotus Notes functions that are 20 years old!

He says

Users can also control who can see their calendar information and in what detail: I might want my supervisor to know when I have a doctor's appointment, but all a colleague needs to know to schedule a meeting with me is when I'm free and when I'm busy.

What a concept, again, where have you been Exchange?


Mailboxes can now be moved live without taking the user offline. Isn't that how it should always be done? Again, Microsoft plays catch up.

But he says

Moving a mailbox from one server to another formerly required taking the user offline for at least a couple of hours, not to mention night and weekend hours for the mail administrator.

OUCH!

There was also this amazing insight:

Exchange 2010 now allows mail federation between trusted companies. This is especially powerful when it comes to scheduling meetings using shared free/busy calendars; suddenly, you can schedule meetings with your business partners as easily as you can schedule meetings within the company. You have the same fine-grained control over the detail that business partners can see in your calendar as you do over what colleagues can see. Another improvement in scheduling is that conference rooms and other meeting resources can be scheduled along with the attendees.

Ho Hum, thanks for following the Lotus Notes world, again. And that improvement in scheduling is also nice to hear so you can gain some parity with Lotus Notes calendaring.

So your boss wants to stay, or go with Exchange because he likes being the laggard instead of the industry leader?
You can also go back and read Ed Brill's post from last week about this and the volumes of comments about it.

Fud Buster Friday #34 - My Blackberry is FASTER than my Mail Client

Notice I didn't say Lotus Notes or Exchange. Yet how many complain about this and trash their mail server to go elsewhere?

I got asked this question in an interview once by a company which I really would love to work for some day.

A company was debating their future infrastructure, typical Exchange vs. Domino and asked what affects Blackberry notifications? Why do some execs (it's always execs isn't it? even my CEO has one) get email seconds or minutes before their mail client? Why would 2 people in the same meeting get notifications seconds or minutes apart?

Admittedly a loaded question, but it gets to the core of understanding messaging, telecom, wireless, devices, infrastructure and customers.

Here is my answer: As much as RIM would like to be able to say it's faster, it just isn't. Well not exactly. Where do you think your email is going first? Usually to your corporate email.

No matter what your email server, your admins, if they are smart enough, limit how often you can hit the server to replicate or for those MS impaired, synchronize. This helps server performance, network bandwidth and other aspects of performance in general. What it doesn't help is the user who absolutely, positively MUST have his email in seconds of it coming in to their inbox.

So let's say you can replicate every 5 minutes. Your Blackberry polls every (EDITED per comment)20 seconds. Now if you use Notes or Exchange on a server, and not locally, you will get notified, although not necessarily that it shows up in your inbox until refreshed. Blackberry wins.

If you run your email locally you must wait for the server to send you the email and that can be at anytime as specified by the admin or your client. Again Blackberry wins.

What about 2 people in the same meeting? Let's put aside they might have 2 different networks(Verizon, AT&T, etc.) and use the same devices. Which by the way is almost impossible as each carrier has tweaked the devices and use different networks. The next point of delay is the BES itself and it's proximity to one's mail file. Perhaps the 2 execs are on different machines for BES and even their mail and one is a slower machine or busier. There is also the possibility that each user has a different size inbox which can also affect the time to arrival on a device. You get the idea.

What astounds me is the executives who say this never happens in Outlook. Forgetting they mean Exchange, of course. I remind them that Exchange would not like their 20GB+ mail file they love in Lotus Notes. Imagine trying to search it on Exchange, if it could handle it at all efficiently.

What does one have to do with another anyway?

BES is slow, must be Lotus fault? And that logic would lead you to believe sales are down we should fire all the sales people and get new ones. There may be some truth in both opinions, but not much sense.

So is Blackberry faster than your email client? Do you really care? Is that really where you want to be spending your time and resources right now?

In the future you may only be using wireless as your medium of choice, if you are not already, and you will never know if it is fast or slow.

But you probably still hate it when someone gets an email before you....don't you?