Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Finds AOL Email Inadequate
DragonMagic writes "MSNBC.com carries this article describing the woes at many of Time Warner's companies after AOL's merger, where the internet giant tried to migrate them all to AOL's email services. From crashing software and attachment limits, to missing and misdirected mail, companies such as Time Magazine had to go so far as to have hard copies rushed before deadlines by cab! Plans are now to retreat from this forced migration and return to the services previously held by each company."
I work for AOL Time Warner, and it was indeed, a directive that came from the top. We *had* to use Netscape 6.2 for all corporate email. Truth be told, the Netscape client is buggy enough, but the real kicker was the AOL email servers that we have to connect to... Unreachable perhaps 25% of the time, and totally unfit for professional use.
Funny thing is, this Slashdot article is the first I've heard about switching back! Mega-corporation which will be crushed under its own weight? Naaa.
I was getting sick of eating my own dogfood, anyway.
I'd like to dip my balls in that.
From the article "The reversal is particularly awkward for Robert Pittman, AOL Time Warner's co-chief operating officer, who had pushed through the move to use AOL's e-mail."
How many people here thing that Mr. Pittman ever had a problem with his AOL mail? I'd bet dollars to pesos that anyone at AOL with a capital "C" in their title has their e-mail running off their own custom-built server.
This was literally the case for one fortune 500 company I contracted for. The CEO/CIO/CFO had their own Compaq Proliant server fully loaded (for the time). It was segregated from the other machines and was constantly watched by at least one Network Engineer. The rest of the company was subjected to constant crap in switching from AT&T outsourcing of e-mail service to in-house properly deployed UNIX solution, then someone falling for the Netscape sales pitch and switching to that, then Microsoft saving us from Netscape by bringing in Exchange, then ended up having Exchange do the mail but Netscape do the directory services...etc.
But the top right wing with all the mahogany furniture never once had a problem with their e-mail. Because of the aforementioned dedicated server which, as far as I know, was running the original UNIX solution and never got touched.
The problem is that this solution can't be applied on a large scale. I think the Steve Case and company probably have (knowingly or unknowingly) been the victims of executive shielding. The people whose jobs rely on their satisfaction would be fools not to. But then along comes some Time Warner company. The AOL brass aren't going to recommended Executive Shielding because they probably don't know about it. The AOL techies doing the shielding aren't going to tell their Time Warner opposites because they don't report to Time Warner. And the Time Warner techies are going to walk naively into the situation and get their asses blamed. But after a year of fired techies you eventually figure out that maybe the problem isn't the staff, it's the damn product.
Well that's just my impression anyway. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were true. I wonder how many people at Time Warner lost their job because they couldn't get a square peg through a round hole for Time Warner management. They never knew the answer was to use one of those new round holes with four corners.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
In order to access any sort of internal AOL functionality, you have to use the AOL client and login as a 'special' employee accout.
I worked at Netscape and when AOL took over, they forced everyone, including Unix developers, to use the AOL client to get to HR forms, 401K info, corporate email, etc.
Netscape had spent 5 years getting every sort of internal functionality on the Net. All HR, 401K, Medical stuff, email, directory, whatever, was _all_ on the Net. Then AOL came in and mandated it all go away to be replaced by the fucking pathetic AOL client.
Now I'm pissed just thinking about it.
(BTW, I worked for AOL for 2 weeks.)
-- topher71
"Do these people not have FTP? Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?"
Don't blame the IT people for this. An FTP site that is easily accessible by internal prepress production and the outside designer isn't a guarantee that anyone will have a clue how to use it.
I'm the "IT guy" (heh...) at a mid-sized commercial printing company. We have an easy-cheesy FTP set up that drops the files right on our proxy server. We have a link to the FTP site from the home page of our web site. (Plus our domain name is...oddly enough...the one-word name of the company.) Even the most file transfer impaired have all sorts of options to get large files to us. We're even going to go to some sort of on-line proofing system. Bet that'll be a can of worms
Can people get us large file? Hell yeah! Do they? Huh? Hell no! "What's FTP?!"
The problem is usually on the designer/ad agency end. I say "usually" because the folks here are *paid* to be technically savvy. If they can't retrieve a file off of our FTP site or any other, they probably should look for another job.
The outside customers get scared if you tell them they have to type in a user name and password. Or if you tell them that apparently *their* firewall isn't letting them out, they drop back to a safe position like...
...email.
And even that can be problematic. Things that we think are simple - compressing files, especially fonts; naming conventions that make sense; resolution issues - become a Big Deal. On the other hand, that's what we're paid to do, troubleshoot, help, smile, be happy, offer fries with that...
I for one am glad AOL-Time Warner is eating their own pooch chow. Now I'll have even more ammo for my whining AOL customers. "I'm trying to send this, but YOUR email server says it's too big." MY email server can take it, baby!
Consigned to flames of woe.
What exactly constitutes "AOL email services," and where was the problem exactly?
I left AOL before most of this actually hit production. But when I was there, the problem was basically this:
- Wrong tool for the job. AOL mail, as many have said, was not originally designed to be a corporate server. AOL itself, minus the Unix geeks, has used AOL e-mail via the AOL client since about 1989. But TW was using a big groupware server (Exchange or Lotus or the like), with forms, workflows, the whole bit. To change over to a text-and-attachment-based system was foolish; to do it in a few months was absurd. Many of us fought the idea vigorously, but in the end, the merger logistics team won the battle in the name of dogfood.
- Worse, what TW was using *wasn't* our dog food - that was the AOL client and servers, which is incredibly reliable and instantaneous for internal mail, and pretty darn good for Internet mail in the past few years - average delivery time in the seconds. But what TW needed to use was the IMAP gateway. The developers on that are excellent, but have never been given the time to really mature the product. Some major architecture changes kept getting pushed back for more urgent matters, both real and perceived. And while the IMAP server speaks nearly perfect IMAP, no client does; we didn't have the time or cooperation to figure out how to work around bugs in OE or Outlook.
- It sounds like they were trying to use the Netscape client. As we all know, that's a couple revs behind Mozilla, and even Mozilla mail doesn't feel quite ready for prime time yet to me.
- Obviously, Gerald Levin didn't want to be GeraldL982341@aol.com, so we tried to graft an aliasing system on top. Sounds from the "misdirected mail" like it either didn't work out or (more likely) was prone to user error.
- tswinzig mentions the spam filters; that's a good point. I can see how they might have caused trouble, and by commingling internal and customer mail, you lose the ability to have the best configuration for each task.
- However, the message limits and attachment-size limits would NOT be a problem. Those haven't been actual physical limits in years; they they are business rules and can be configured as needed. (Can you imagine how many copies of Windows XP would sit in people's mailboxes if every AOL member could send arbitrarily-sized attachments?)
It's a shame. The AOL core mail system is actually much faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run than sendmail (if I do say so myself). But by putting TW on before it was ready, and before the resources could be committed to make it a first-class IMAP server, they screwed both TW and any chance of getting respectability as a business e-mail solution.
Jay, the ex-AOL Mail Guy