Background
There’s a saying that the cobbler’s children have the worst-looking shoes. “Never change a running system” is probably the IT equivalent of that saying. Our internal email, calendar, and task management tool had also become outdated. How do you update legacy software without causing even an hour of downtime for email and the calendar—our most important tools?
The Implementation
Well, thorough planning and a motivated team are the keys here.
First of all, we researched which open-source systems were even viable options for us. After a few detours, our IT team found SOGo as a complete replacement. Interim tests with the stakeholders showed that the system met all requirements. Some features were different from what we were used to, but they were significantly better than we could have ever imagined.
Another advantage is that SOGo is open-source groupware, so we have the option to host the system ourselves and see exactly what happens to our data. Under the GDPR, data processing agreements with large cloud hosts are common, but we at the “ punkt.de ” like to “see” exactly what’s really happening behind the scenes—in keeping with the data protection motto: Trust is good, control is better.
For the reasons mentioned above, the 360-degree hosting offered by the well-known company from Redmond was never an option for us. On February 13, 2020, the time had finally come. After completing the preparatory work the day before, we switched over to the new system at 11:00 a.m.
And what happened—or rather, how was it noticeable? To our customers (who are our top priority), hardly at all. The only thing was that I didn’t want to migrate our recurring appointments from the old system; instead, I wanted to create them anew in the new system. So I asked our customers to resend me their recurring appointments. Other than that, there were no outwardly noticeable issues.
Internally, we had to get used to the new system, but the “Standby mOps of the Day” was a huge help. All the little “adjustments” that a new system inevitably brings were resolved immediately, so that as of yesterday, the new system has been fully accepted. So we’re happy to have a modern system that we can now update fully automatically at any time. On top of that, we’ve remained true to our commitment to open source.
If you’d like to hear more about our transition, or if you’d like to use software yourself that gives you full control over your data, please feel free to contact me.
