Over the past two weeks I've been trying to migrate a small company of 15ish staff to Google Apps. This isn't the first time I've done this but this is probably the most complicated migration I've done thanks to the existing infrastructure.
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| Me every night since Saturday |
The situation was that there was a Google account (let's call it sales@company.com) which everyone accessed the calendar and drive from but a different email server. The email server was also a pain - for various reasons it wasn't an ideal setup but it was working.
So the challenge was to sign up for Google Apps, set up everybody's email and then import the existing accounts. Then I would have to merge that with the existing Gmail account.
So there's the background. Now here's what I learnt. Note that
none of this is likely to be useful to you as a reader because if I were reading this blog a month my response to most of these lessons would have been "yeah - obviously". I'm just writing this for future me who is hopefully going to learn from this experience.
Lesson 1 - Don't panic and do something you weren't planning on doing
My first attempt at a migration happened back in April and after a panicked Sunday spent going "BUT WHY CAN'T YOU SEND EMAIL GOOGLE" I realised that I had the wrong server. I had been given a login to some email server that existed for legacy reasons but had never been set up properly. But in my panic thinking that emails were going to be bouncing back to customers I set up sales@company.com on Google Apps. This meant that the Google account that people were using to access Drive and the rest was renamed to "sales%company@gtemp.com" because "an organisation has claimed the email you were previously using for this email".
I'd seen this error in the past so I wasn't too concerned and didn't think about it too deeply.
Buuuuut this left the account in limbo for about a week (possibly two) - that's two weeks where I don't think anything happened but I don't know. A few problems occurred during this time and I'm pretty sure it was my fault but I didn't realise and I still don't know. I don't know what happened but the timing of the issues match up.
Lesson 2 - People don't read
I'd learnt previously that over-communication is better than less communication since it makes people feel reassured. But
I should have known better to communicate anything actually useful or an ask in a text based message. If you want someone to do something (like log out of the old account and log into the new one) you have to either call them or stand over their shoulder while they do it. Lot's of problems that occurred could have been avoided if people had either:
- Signed out of their account on the Friday
- Called me when they noticed certain events taking place
Both of these things I had asked people to do - but I didn't grab their attention by the t-shirt and tell them while I was standing right there.
Lesson 3 - Don't give people options
So that gtemp account - I left that open for people because I thought people might need something from it. Say something wasn't on the new Google Drive - then they can log into the old account and check if that has the info they need before they call me.
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| lol nope |
When people did bother to do this all it did was confuse them. What I should have done was locked this account up - changed the picture so you could immediately identify it was the old account and changed the password so everyone who had ignored the "log out on Friday" instruction didn't have a choice.
Lesson 4 - Conduct interviews beforehand
I'm actually embarrassed to admit this but I DID NOT CHECK HOW PEOPLE WORKED FIRST. Because I'm an idiot who didn't want to take up too many people's time. People are always busy and I always feel like an inconvenience so I didn't do this but I SHOULD have.
Future me - you won't want to do this either but you MUST. Sit down with each person in each office and just watch them work for half an hour. Ask questions. Don't feel embarrassed - set a timer and stick it out if you have to. Do 5 minutes every 3 hours over a week. It's annoying but if you don't you're an idiot.
This time can also be used to prepare the computers - do the updates, delete the old accounts, empty the recycle bin, etc.
Lesson 5 - Backup everything. Even the things that have nothing to do with anything.
I DID THIS! I'M SO GLAD I DID THIS.
I didn't do it as much as I should have and more backups would have come in handy but every backup I did I used. I backed up a Google calendar that I was sure wouldn't need a backup but because I was doing the other calendars I did it anyway. I backed up a file only I have and only I use. The original file was overwritten by someone.
Lesson 6 (?) - Do things one step at a time?
I'm actually not sure about this one. Maybe I should have updated the email and left the Google Drive and calendars alone? It would have made my life easier on that first day because I would only have been worrying about the email and given myself more time to think. But on the other hand - maybe doing everything at once in a big bang was better. I thought I HAD to do it this way but I didn't consider a slower roll out.
Maybe this should read "Consider doing things one step at a time".
Lesson 7 - Don't do things by yourself
So there are two parts to this.
Part one is that if you're doing someone un-routine it helps to have someone to talk things through with. Someone who can follow what you're doing even if they haven't done it themselves. I'm not talking about rubber ducks here but someone who will repeat things back to you and tell you if you've missed something obvious.
Part two is that on day 2 of problems a contractor was called in to support me. I was initially hurt / annoyed but my ego isn't big enough to hold it against anyone and actually this person became the person I was talking about above. This person had more experience than me and was able to solve a problem I was leaving for another day. Having someone else also reassured other people that everything was being handled.
So if someone from this company is reading this thinking "Ah - I feel bad for implying she couldn't do it alone" don't feel that way. I'm over it and if you'd asked me I wouldn't have accepted help, so thank you and I'll work on the asking for help thing.
Lesson 8 - This will take more time than you think AKA One project at a time
So I'm not getting anything else done at work this week. I've used all my adrenaline up and I'm basically scared off any more change for at least the next month. There's also a few things from the gtemp account that still need importing into the new account this week. I'm relying on the fact that I'm the only person who uses these features (e.g G+).
This was not the week to have a deadline for another project. Whelp. Not much I can do about that now. Here's to a week of late nights and early mornings.
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| がんばれ! |