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November 18, 2004
"Handling by Lotus": From the Real World
At 4:30 in the evening, a week ago, a lawyer emailed my boss: "Why does my secretary's iManage search for matter-related documents turn up my private emails about the matter's client?" Oh.
My boss runs to my office, where I've been stuck migrating mailboxes from Lotus Notes to .pst files to iManage via drag'n'drop for the week (try doing that for lawyers that think it necessary to put the single monthly email about the firm's income/expenses into an individual folder...for every month of the past five years!). We gang up, and replicate her search. Yep, there they are, available for the entire firm to see, and boy, that's not baby-talk about the client in there. This is Real Business; this is bad.
How did this happen? It's definitely related to the mailbox migration that my co-worker and I are doing. But how? We test, and figure out that we are not misfiling those emails. Instead, it appears that individual, random emails are failing to get their public/private bits set by the DBMS in the iManage database. We are pounding the MS SQL server with nine boxes, all migrating mailboxes full-bore. Oh boy. We all decide to stay late and fix this. We begin to go through and search all thirty-six users migrated mailboxes for public emails. But then our SQL guru notices that not only are some of the emails mis-set public/private--they aren't filed into a folder!. They're in Never-Never Land, the flatspace. Double-plus ungood. The DBMS is failing transactions on random single records and not rolling the transaction back!!! We're losing data, and not being warned! Where's my towel?!
Tearing of shirts, weeping and knashing of teeth. Knuckle biting, turbo to iManage veep for tech support, pizza and beer for the team, ftp server logs to their tech support, argue about implications and timelines for conversion project. Our migration from Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Outlook/Interwoven Mailsite is coming to a crest, after a year of planning and work, and we're two weeks away from our planned switch. But now we've lost trust in the vendor's software, and two weeks isn't enough to get that back.
The next morning, we postpone our grand Lotus Notes -> Microsoft Outlook/Interwoven Mailsite conversion. It's been on the books for a year, we were two weeks away from rollout, and we had spent roughly two man-years preparing for the conversion to happen over Thanksgiving weekend. But because iManage's transaction manager goes flacky once it is pounded(?!), we have to postpone for another six months. The Inverwoven guy said "It's like taking a Ford Escort to 120mph. Somethings going to happen, but we don't know what." But an Escort has a speed-limiter. iManage is an enterprise-level knowledge management system--a Mercedes-Benz. And our network design is within their spec. It's their DBMS that is falling apart like an Isuzu with "Handling by Lotus".
Learned: test, test, test, before, during, after. We didn't catch the failure, but we did find out about it before we went live. It's better to keep user's trust and be late than to be on time and lose trust. We only have one chance to convince our attorneys that this is a Good Thing--lose some of their documents, and they'll be burned one too many times.
The project is on indefinite hold; the attorney's private "Joke" folders are still only visible to them; the matter-centric workspace will have to wait for another day to revolutionize the firm's workflow.
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Posted by Noel at 09:20 AM
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