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Sky's Botched Google Migration In the UK
An anonymous reader writes "Rupert Murdoch-owned British ISP Sky is migrating their customers to the Google Apps platform, and the customer experience is terrible. Their 1 million customers were told that they need to change their client settings to enable SMTP Authentication and other settings on a certain date — but not to do it before then or their e-mail would break; but if you don't do it on the date your e-mail will also break. Oh, and if you're a POP user you also need to enable that manually in the 'Skoogle' interface, as seemingly they chose not to run a system-wide command to allow it for all users. In addition, if you want help then you're pretty much on your own. One user has made 7 support calls and still not been able to access his e-mail since the migration. Hardly surprising that the story has made the papers with their help-desk in meltdown. It does make you wonder why they simply didn't put proxy servers in place to proxy the new service by modifying the old settings in the network and give their customers time to switch over without their e-mail breaking in the meantime. Or even a simple ActiveX tool to help out the less technical users."
Are you mad?
is confusion among the less experienced. I was just looking at the instructions they provide and I will certainly admit it's less than just a few mouse clicks. Any user guide that is like 12 pages of interaction is probably a bit much to ask of the average user. Looks more like a user manual than a quick set of instructions for a "simple change".
I would not thoroughly enjoy following those instructions, and I'm quite certain it terrifies at least 15% of their customer base.
And to the previous comment of "active x - are you mad?" I would add a "me too", for reasons too numerous to get into here.
This is the kind of thing I'd expect to find on an install CD from an ISP, that configures your computer for their service when you insert the CD. Setups like that are either provided on disc or are a "deliver and setup" option for ISPs when they have this level of setup required. Expecting Joe User to do this is just plain crazy.
I bet their phone support is buried for quite some time to come.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
this is what happens when you do a deal with the anti-christ... now watching 1 million more peoples every move thanks to the idiots a sky.
Thats all it is, guesswork because nobody really knows what effects their changes will have on a system. Usually the response is it "should" work when asked a simple question of a developer.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
OK, Steve, but you've got plenty of minions to fix it for you.
Had a similar problem when BTInternet moved to Yahoo!. Took a month to get it fixed.
Wow... now I've seen everything. I mean, granted it was a kdawson post, but still... someone suggesting using ActiveX to help a Google migration... talk about crazy.
</troll>
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
"You can dual boot your computer with Linux, but if you don't defrag and partition the HDD, you'll lose all your data."
Hi there, Mr. Ballmer!
To begin with, your post is wildly off-topic, and that's generally disliked by the moderators here, I suppose that's why you posted AC.
Second, 1997 called and they want your "defrag and partition" statement back. Oh wait, is that still needed with a Microsoft Windows install? Certainly not with Linux. Unless you want to specify manually your partition scheme, it's done automagically for you without disturbing your existing data.
Third, the mess TFA mentions would not exist if all users had Linux installed. In a system that has a proper command scripting language, it's a very simple matter to perform an automatic migration. The problem starts when you need a "simple ActiveX tool" to do the job.
1. Crash transition with no fallback. Risky.
2. Having less technical users handle the changes without ramping up the help desk. Risky.
3. Breaking peoples' email. You're a bloody idiot. I used to be able to break almost anything and people could deal with it, but break the phones or the email and things get very bad, very fast.
Its because they are incompetent or they want the whole project to fail. I'd put more faith in the first reason. You see, I have seen more incompetent "computer gurus" in the past few years than one can imagine.
This was obviously caused by stupid, useless instructions from Sky's tech support people, and not a Google Docs issue. All the same, I smell a big fat troll here... ActiveX? Are you out of your mind?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Being an IT bod, people ask you about their home computers, and why has Sky BB email suddenly stopped with some bizare msgs.
I told him, if you haven't changed anything and its been going on for a day or two give em a ring. So he did. Got through all the usual stuff. Only on the fourth call did they inform him he needed to change his settings. The guy didn't elaborate, but I wasn't that interesting.
What a mess.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I'm sure it isn't "change for sake of progress," it is almost certainly because it is MUCH cheaper.
Running a responsive e-mail server has always been expensive. Now that google has set people's expectations at 2+GB quotas, it is just ridiculous.
Google used their massive infrastructure to make scalability affordable, and ISPs can't compete. Most of their customers probably already use gmail, so why continue offering the service?
In fact there's no need for ActiveX; Microsoft provide the INS/ISP file format for this very purpose, configuring ISP details. Of course it's really laziness to a) turn off the old servers whilst people are still migrating and b) not setup cname records to migrate after a certain time.
LOL, anybody who expected anything better from sky is a fool...as ex 'techincal support' sky broadband, the real reason for the switch over is that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of users who will "never be able to access their email" due to some screw up with SAM or something that sky cant get its big fat head around. Just a warning to anyone actually thinking about calling them up about your sky email...dont bother. you are better off asking your dog. email training for 'technical support' is more like 'how to send email' training. they are also told not to support anything to do with outlook, most of the operators dont even know what a POP is, let alone what its address is...and heaven help you if you are luck enough to get through to one of the overseas call centers, they are using photocopied sheets of paper to troubleshoot your problem.
ahh, well, at least we know where all the money is going...
The guide or howto for the migration appears to be fool proof. But I wonder whether there could be any technical problem with the migration. Is it possible that Google servers have been overwhelmed by the change that appears to be abrupt?
I see where Sky mentions Google docs in their instructions, however the instructions they gave their users only pertained to changing a few email settings. What does this have to do with Google docs? I use Google docs; is this something different Sky has set up with Google to make their customers think they are getting something special? You know, like AOL use to do with their "free" virus "protection", and their super "fast" dial up, and all their "crappy" adware.
Furthermore, unless Sky is a strange ISP, their customers should still have access to web based email, so why all the hoopla?
It was a very bonehead thing to do, however, to depend on customers to change email settings when a small setup app could have done the job without any fuss.
Well of course. If you change before, you have the wrong settings. If you don't change afterward, you have the wrong settings.
FAQs are evil.
I had a similar experience when i migrated my personal domain to google apps personal (no fee) from dotmac.
I had a set of family groups for my dotmac domain and email IDs.
When i moved it to Google Apps i ended up trouble shooting homepage and pages issues so much that i stopped with mail, docs and pages.
The homepage is still hosted by my dotmac.
Secondly google apps personal does not allow you to upload a custom-made homepage.
I use a PDF as a homepage for my family newsletter as it is easier for all browsers (yeah, some nerds in my family do use Windows 98 SE and some use Nokia N95 internet tablet.).
The main issues i saw were the issues with domain rerouting, pages and some issues with docs.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...this problem has so far earned me GBP 70. I am a freelance computer repairer for home users. I have been to two homes to enable POP and alter the mail client settings. I charged them GBP 35 each. Enabling POP was a struggle because the Sky website didn't seem to want to work properly. After half an hour of trying in both cases I finally managed to reach the necessary check box on the webmail settings page and click Apply.
Both the householders were completely baffled by this change that they never asked for. I told them both that Sky's helpline must be inundated by people literally crying on the phone, unable to understand what has happened and why their mail client doesn't work any more.
it looks like they just signed up to Google Apps, just like I did, and then changed their DNS records.
:-( ...maybe Sky are using the 'Free for personal use' version of Google Apps ! :-)
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with this - SMTP auth, username format, password and sub-mailbox management etc. etc.
Proxying as suggested by another isn't as simple as it sounds (Googlemail usernames have the domain name appended to them), and customers with their own mail servers are going to spend days digging manuals to get SMTP auth working, or switch to direct delivery.
However it's clear that Sky customer service has gone down the toilet.
I think it's summed up by the fact that once you login, the URL changes to:
http://mail.google.com/a/sky.com
Which is going to confuse a lot of customers, unaware of the fact that Google now 'sort of' do their email on behalf on Sky
Dom
This is one of many reasons most people I know don't use their ISP email. Apart from the obvious one that it doesnt usually follow you across ISPs.
I have my work email for business / high priority stuff and web mail for my personal life, I thought this kind of setup was actually the norm.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
That's because no one puts in the time to do any research into if their systems will cope. I just watched this Google video the other day on how they make sure Gtalk would cope with all the data they needed to give out.
Might have surprised Mr Murdoch - he thought he owned all the papers.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
It's a bit misleading to say the Rupert Murdoch owns Sky, New International holds about 40% of Sky, and the Murdoch family hold just over 30% of News International. It's really an object lesson in how to maintain control with large but minority shareholdings.
I strongly disagree.
As a systems manager, in my experience any set of instructions which is longer than one page including screenshots is too complicated and liable to all sorts of breakage. If your process requires much more than that, it needs simplifying if you are to have a hope of it being followed properly.
There are a few exceptions to this, but most of them concern systems which do something of a specialist nature, and you're describing it to an audience which will understand what the system is trying to do. Neither of which really applies here.
This procedure is 12 pages long.
Most of their customers probably already use gmail, so why continue offering the service?
At least among the technically inexperienced, Gmail usage isn't all that high in the UK. Even looking at my college IT class, most of whom were geeks of some description, it was mostly Hotmail or Yahoo.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, but still...
I write bullshit
I had a quick look at the PDF, and I'll agree that while it's not pretty on-screen, reading a printed copy wouldn't be too bad. At least no more onerous than browsing the brochure-type instructions you get with many consumer products (Linksys routers, for example).
For comparison's sake, the similar changeover by ATT for their customers was handled by a Yahoo-bot (I'm not making that up) email advisory:
A bit simpler, I guess.
Then again, the notice makes no mention of or otherwise provide a link to download their Equifax certificate. And where the hell are the OpenSSL instructions, like using c_rehash, or verifying things with s_client!!??? You'd think they could at least have included a quick howto on configuring fetchmail to use SSL certs, but nooooo!
I guess whatever your knowlege level is, you can always find a reason to bitch and moan about things being too complicated.
Why POP? Why not IMAP? and secondly, why are there not Mail SRV Records in their DNS Tables to automatically redirect the E-mail clients transparently?
How on Earth did this "plan" make it through to the execution phase? I'm sorry Sky techs, but when I read this, sitting as I am on a Sunday with nothing in particular taking up my sweet time, all I could think was "Ha ha...ha ha haa haaaaaaaa you poor bastards!"
All I can imagine is that nobody who was anywhere near reality was behind this...i.e. consultants. Anyone with a passing regard for humans using computers would have come up with something better.
I cannot see why they wouldnt just proxy everything (either by actual proxies or by changing dns accordingly) so the old settings still work.
The Sky ISP is actually Easynet UK - who were bought some time ago by Sky since this was more cost effective than buying service from Easynet.
They're almost certainly doing this as a cost saving - Big arrays, risk of customer data loss, expense of backups are all factors.. it is easier to porn this off to google since their solution and peering to them is that much more resilient (everyone thinks.. and probably rightly so) than running your own.
There has been a drive to get rid of 'application' hosting in ISPs and change the model to that of pure access to keep the costs and skillsets involved for management to a minimum.
For instance Easynet's (failed residential LLU) competitor Bulldog barely provided an smtp relay for customers, the rest was outsourced.
I can understand why they'd want to leave their customer mail with Google when new items like these pop up: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/easynet_brick_lane_robbery/
POP3 clients (simple or advanced) do not following this "conversation" paradigm, and by not getting a copy of their own post two things happen: A) You have no confirmation the post made it to the list and B) you break threading on the email client because now people are responding to a message that never made it on my list.
The sad part is attempting to send yourself a copy of the message via CC: or BCC: does not work! Its like Gmail went out of its way to ensure you do not get a copy of your own post. Additionally while Google searching suggests there is an option to get yourself a copy of your own post, I was unable to find it anywhere.
I feel sorry for any of these people who are being switched over to Gmail's POP3 and are on mailing lists.
Others have written about the situation as well: Gmail + POP + mailing lists = broken
I really don't get what all the fuss is about. For over a year now I've used gmail with an MUA (sylpheed) for all email. It was no harder than setting up ISP email. There are no magic tricks or anything, just enter settings and use email! I have to wonder, what would these people do in case of a real problem? And who set up their email the first time?
Caveat Utilitor
The people who don't understand the details are almost all Windows users using IE, so an ActiveX is the logical choice.
/. are very much the exception rather than the rule.
People running Linux, FF on Windows or even reading
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Summary of that video..
"um", "ahm", "uh", "am", "eh"
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
I used to work for Easynet, the ISP who Sky bought in 2006 in order to use their LLU network for Sky Broadband. Easynet was split into two parts, Enterprise - to deal with Easynet's traditional customers and Sky Network Services (SNS) to provide ISP services to Sky as well as telephony services in the future.
SNS has a culture of incompetence and from what I seen with my brief exposure to Sky, their IT department was no better. The mail platform was originally launched in house, developed separately from the existing Easynet platform, the mail platform had to authenticate against SAM, which is Sky's internal authentication system, often problems would arise with SAM, SNS staff had no access to the system and upon calling Sky they'd claim there's no problem with their system and only after hours of checking every possibility at our end they'd then check SAM which would turn out to be the problem 90% of the time.
The developers on the SNS side are nothing short of useless, they would frequently deliver highly unreliable software which showed a lack of testing at even the basic level, a part of this seemed to be related to the agile methodology they believed in so much. They seem to spend more time holding meetings standing around a wall and rearranging post-it notes with various tasks that need to be done. To be fair, Sky do set tight deadlines, but SNS needs to change their development methodology to get things done.
I was gone before the Google migration, but I've had experience with Google apps and I know Google provides a reasonable set of migration tools, Sky is a larger than usual migration, they're one of the UK's largest ISPs despite starting just over a year ago so they couldn't just migrate the accounts all at once, however, a proxying solution probably would have worked fine. I think the problem was that Sky only officially supported webmail and left POP and IMAP as an exercise for the customer to discover. However, the Sky webmail platform was written by a 3rd party and hosted on Sky servers that were not under the control of SNS/Easynet, the Sky Webmail platform was so bad that it only supported plain text and if you were sent an email that only had an HTML part it would display the source in the window, it got a lot of confused customers! They probably thought only a few people used POP and so not much reconfiguration needed as everyone would be using webmail.
In the stated context of dual booting, partition == make one (or room for one) for Linux instead of overwriting your Windows one, thereby losing your data since you're a newbie with no backups. Defragging is/was necessary for primitive/free/cheap partition resizing tools because they either couldn't or couldn't reliably relocate blocks by themselves. Defrag > resize > install linux on vacated space. Follow?
And fuck knows what the hell they need that horrible ActiveX shit for (and they probably don't, they're just twits), but the average *nix scripting language isn't a client-side browser scripting language at all so it's hardly a comparison. Outside of the browser, there are in fact scripting options on Windows beyond batch files and there's always plain ol' binary executables.
Now, aren't you late for class or something? 14 year old angsty tards were still required to attend regularly last I checked.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Yes, but Murdoch is a Jew Neo-Con
Therefore, we much blame him for anything that goes wrong.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Let s be serious... Any Senior Sysadmin will have a better plan to migrate all this account. Currently in my University we have 4000 accounts and going to 44000 on December. We cant plan everything but the first batch was a success. What make the first migration batch a success: 1- More staff on Help Desk; 2- No choices ( the more choices the user has, more expensive it gets). 3- Communication, Personal Letters, Banners, Kiosks. 4- Feedback and control. What what is going wrong and fix it fast. Google apps is a great service. Until now we only have 20 trouble tickets from people who lost the communication letter or lost the password.. And it is way better than Microsoft Live-Suck-Miis-Pay-License..
That means Gmail is broken, period. If it /dev/nulls any message at all without your consent, it's broken. So, as usual, you get what you pay for.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Good Lord. I thought we had it rough when the local ISP I work for migrated mail servers internally for 20000+ users this summer. Even shifting people over in small batches and providing instructions for multiple e-mail clients(unlike Sky), we still ended up with about half our userbase calling in over a 2-3 month period as we rolled it out. Regular staff was putting in overtime and some temps* were brought on to help out, but it was still quite the nonstop parade of callers. And of course, they're running anything and everything from OS 8/Win95 onwards, along with just about any version of any mail client that will run on those systems. Oh, and on top of changing serverse, we also switched to requiring SMTP authentication in the process, so yeah, fun times trying to convince people to upgrade to something that supported it or coerce clients to properly use it :coughOE5Mac:
Scale that to a userbase a million strong and try to do it all at once? Even the lowly support monkey that I am could tell you that's a very dumb idea.
*I was one of those oh-so-lucky temps, and managed to earn full time employment out of it, huzzah.
I see no reason why other browsers should not ask the OS for proxy settings, it can be set from Control panel (internet options) without having to invoke Internet Explorer or Outlook.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Please mod-down the parent. It simply copies a paragraph from the grandparent post and adds a spam link at the end. I accidentally modded it informative and thanks to Slasdot's wonderful new auto-apply feature the only way I can undo it is to post this fucking reply.
My experience is the same. I found that when Gmail was new, many people switched relatively quickly. (About 10% of my address book). After the initial influx, I only see the occasional person switch to Gmail. In-fact, in the last year, the only people in my address book that have switched have done so on my recommendation so I could get out of doing unpaid tech support for them fixing their ISP accounts :-P
As an aside, Google should begin advertising their new IMAP service more, as it allows people to use their same client but take it anywhere with them and switch isp services at ease. If they do that though, they should make their imap service faster than molasses before doing so.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Shocking service.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
In fact, come to think of it, the entire article summary is built in a certain way:
1. Mention of Google Apps, a product that competes with Microsoft.
2. Mention of something being "broken."
A couple of important notes about that:
2.1. The thing with a potential issue, E-mail sending, has nothing to do with Google Apps, however it's mentioned to create a negative association with them.
2.2. The potential issue is exaggeration to the point of idiocy. Nothing actually gets broken; you just have to change a certain setting on a certain date, and if you don't, it's not like your house catches fire or anything. OR MAYBE IT DOES?!?!?! WHO CAN BE SURE?
And then, the coup de grace:
3. Mention of a Microsoft proprietary technology as a solution.
And of course, can't let that go by without adding:
3.1. A technology that forces everyone into vendor lock-in with the Microsoft Way Of Doing Things, and
3.2. A cure that is far worse than a disease, a technology that opens your system up to all kinds of hacks and attacks for the sake of preventing something that Grandma can easily be walked through fixing. (If you don't believe me, look at all the Grandmas who are walked through setting up their Email by Apple tech help and Evolution e-mail wizards every day.)
In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the summary above has all the hallmarks of a professionally-written Microsoft FUD-job.
Someone was paid to write this article and submit it to Slashdot so that all of our geeky eyes can see it and wonder, "Oh, the horrors of Google Apps! They should have gone with Microsoft," when not only do Google Apps have nothing to do with the problem, the problem itself would have been made worse by the proposed solution.
And they would have gotten away with it if it hadn't 've been for you kids!
We were hit with this: first an email advising that we needed to change the settings on a certain day. Did this, didn't work. Phoned sky on a non-free number, was on hold for an hour, was eventually advised that their entire mail infrastructure was out of action for the week: try later. This wasn't communicated to anyone - Sky support are appalling.
They don't know what's going on in their own network, they employ people who don't know what a POP mailbox is to work tech support, and they routinely palm off customers.
Fancy waiting 3 days for a password reset to get into your email, when it's not a password reset that's needed - instead they have broken synchronisation between your sky tv account and sky email account. Two separate accounts, but if you don't have the same password on both, it'll break email. 3 days of waiting - and the password reset doesn't work as that wasn't the bloody problem in the first place. Arggggh.
It's worth noting that Sky's broadband is "free" in that if you subscribe to their digital TV service, you can get limited broadband for free, not-so-limited broadband for 5UKP a month, and almost-unlimited broadband for a tenner. This probably explains why they're so poorly supported. Oh, and the sky-branded, custom-firmware version netgear router they supply falls over regularly and requires a reboot if you dare to turn on UPnP.
Well according to a doughnut at the BBC he seems to think it is the users and not Sky at fault But I am starting to think that anyone who can't follow the step-by-step guide to updating their Outlook account settings really shouldn't be using e-mail at all - they clearly have so little understanding of the technology in their hands that it's like letting a small child play with an unlicensed nuclear reactor. http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/sky-news-announcements/18145-sky-customers-clearly-have-so-little-understanding.html
My company does Google Apps migrations as a service to ISPs and other companies. Yes, it is sometimes tricky. However, it looks like Sky did the right thing here in providing a service window for people to be able to access their old email, and use the new Google Apps (Gmail Client). There are some shortcomings to the Google Apps API that make some bulk management tasks cumbersome, but they are improving it all the time and for the most part the advantages to the ISP (low cost, reliable service) and the user (user experience and storage) are well worth it.
I blogged about this today over here: http://blog.ltech.com/2007/11/19/understanding-google-apps-migration-issues-sky-moves-1-million-users-to-apps/