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.

Excellent Domino Customer Service via Twitter

I just saw a tweet on Twitter from the UNLV IT department. You guys are doing a great job if you can be this upfront about your work. Most Fortune 500 companies aren't this good.

What a great way to communicate services. The only problem is people have to be following you. So before you go run out and do this for your clients, find out if they use Twitter.

If they do, introduce them to Twitnotes from Mikkel and teach them how to use the sidebar at the same time.

Wonder if they have the server send this automatic on startup/shutdown from the server doc or some other means. Anyone have a way to do this now, let me know as I would like to do this for my servers.

FudBuster Friday #5 - No Resources

This FudBuster is for everyone in Sales or IT, depends on how you view it.
Following up from Ed Brill's post yesterday and some comments I made there got me thinking.

The #1 answer I get when asking clients why they don't upgrade to R8 of Domino or Sametime or Quickr is:
1) No Money
2) No Time
3) Why, we are happy on the version we are using
4) Lack of Resources (whatever that means in reality)
5) All of the above

Bingo, #5. No doubt many of you have more answers, please comment withthem, they might make it into FudBuister #6.

Many clients have been paying for support and maintenance which usually means you are entitled to upgrade AT ANY TIME. Sadly, they don't. They pay and pay and IBM/Lotus makes money off them, but suffers because these same clients are at least 1-2 versions behind.

So they spent all their money on software.... but they own it and could upgrade at anytime.
Whoah! You say you don't have enough staff to do this? OK, simple numbers, can you upgrade one server a week? Probably.
Can you upgrade a batch of clients at a time? Probably, with some preliminary work.
Can you do 10,000 people in one week? Yes, but you won't usually for various reasons, but it CAN be done.

Small staff numbers? Get help, it's cheaper than you think.

No budget? Go ask a business line how they expect to sell more with less people and slower programs or how you could provide them with quotes/pricing to their phone while sitting with the client? You don't know how to do this? Call me or come to Lotusphere.

Happy on the version we use. Hardest one to beat, especialy in organizations with large turnover of staff or very specific needs. One answer is to run your machine like a demonstration box. Make every business line person or sales or whoever come to you or if you have a laptop go to them. I don't know your business, but if you do, I am quite sure you could create a very functional and useful UI that they would jump at to own. This is how I do demo's for potential clients on why they should be upgrading to R8 of Domino, Notes, Sametime or Quickr.

Money is the easiest and hardest thing to get around. Yet, if the business line or executive wants it, suddenly there is money. Just remember my thoughts on this, it is not CHEAP. I fyou say it will cost $5,000 to do it you will not get any respect from executives or business lines.

They want to perceive value based on price. That doesn't mean to tell them it's $1 million, but make it enough so it goes to a budget meeting, not someone who just says yes or no.

If Lotus is truly a corporate solution for you and your company, then treat it like one.