As I hinted at here, I’ve been working on a mail related project…. Well it’s finally over and I’ve got some time to blog again… and it feels nice!

It’s been a busy few months, and December has been double-long (60+ extra hours in the first fortnight!!) but it’s been worth it. The new mail platform for Manx.net is done. I have to pass much thanks on to the team at Mirapoint here in the UK – they have been consummate professionals throughout the project and the positive feedback we’re getting now is proof that it’s been worth the effort.

I was given the project early in the year (within a month of starting) and it was no small project either – webmail and POP3 / IMAP access for ~27000 people all of whom live within 1 hours drive of me! The existing platform was becoming increasingly flaky and customer complaints were growing by the day.

There was no margin for error – the migration had to work and it had to work first time. As I mentioned living as I do, on the Isle of Man – no-one is more than an hour away by car – so the potential for “feedback” coming and biting me was very real and slightly terrifying.

As it turned out, it all went very well, we had a few issues and I’m sure there’s a couple of our customers who might disagree with me, but all in all it was a very smooth changeover. I’d make a couple of suggestions to anyone who is considering a major platform change like this in future…..

• Ensure you make sure your password policies are the same – so if your old platform is not case sensitive – make sure your new one isn’t! This caused a bit of pain…..
• Make sure the rest of your infrastructure is ready to handle the increased load. A change like this makes a lot of people “test” the new system out – so make sure your call centre staff have been trained on the basics and that support services such as DNS are fully specced to handle the load.

Over-all it was hard work but extremely rewarding – and not a fortnight I’d like to go through again any time soon 🙂

I’d just like to name a few people who deserve extra thanks for making it all go so well…. Tony, Kev, Steve, Dickie, Sarah – you all deserve medals – and the rest of you (you know who you are) – I couldn’t have done it without you!

Finally – there’s one person who deserves thanks more than anyone – my wonderful wife Becs – without your patience and understanding I think I’d have gone mad!

 

Right – back to normal service now – I’m promising myself that I’m going to blog more in 2007 – it won’t be hard to do more than 2006 – but I’m going to work on it…… 😉