Completion of the East’s Migration to Google
Greetings unto the Populace from the Webministry of the East Kingdom!
I am pleased to report that the last cleanup steps of the migration of our email services to Google are done, the project is complete.
Obviously, this has been a massive undertaking, and while I have been the primary public face and the project manager, many other people have been involved to varying degrees. Without all of the assistance (and assistants!) this would not have gone as well as it did. By my best estimate, this undertaking was approximately 1.25 man-years of effort, a huge portion of it quite skilled work done by actual IT professionals. Early on in the process I worked up what my own employer would have quoted as a price for this, and it came to approximately a half a million dollars.
David Vázquez de Valençia came in at just the right moment, and brought expertise to the team we desperately needed. He developed most of the tools that allowed us to do the migrations, the tools that we will be using going forward to manage users and handle office handovers, and took over much of the behind-the-scenes communications with branches to ensure their migrations went smoothly. Every group that was migrated, branch or Kingdom Office or Guild, David’s fingers were directly involved in at least creating your accounts, and at least indirectly in the entire rest of the process. I can’t even begin to express how grateful we are for his work, and won’t even consider how this might have done without him.
Matthias von Würzburg was one of four members of the team that triggered migrations, and has been fielding a sizeable portion of the user support needs, particularly recently. Matthias dealing with the requests for assistance in setting initial passwords, finding the odd place where we had put migrated emails, and so on, meant that the rest of us could keep our focus on getting the overall job done.
Sisuile Butler began the project as our lead technical writer. Symon of Barnesdale stepped up and took over as our lead technical writer when Sisuile had to take a bit of a step back. Between the two of them, they documented every task around the entire project ranging from what most of our users need to know back through what webministers will need in order to manage this environment in to the future. Anyone who has had to refer to these documents is fully aware of just how lucky we have been to have these two tag-teaming on getting those written.
Mael Eoin mac Echuid, our Kingdom Webminister, handled the politics (any project this big involves politics), and did the initial rounds of collecting user information from the branches. He was also part of the team that actually triggered each migration.
Harvey Wynegode, who along with Matthias provided us with our first two branches to experiment on, and therefore handled a more-than-usual load of “Wait… how does this work?”
The many others who assisted with testing, vetting the documentation, etc. many of whom I can’t tag here: Alienor Salton, Aloysius, Conn mac Branian, Dalek Bolotnikov, Faolán an Sccreccain, Jenevra de Carvalhal, Mathghamhain Ua Ruidháin, Saravit Chuaprasert, and probably more that I may not even know of.
And finally, many thanks to Their Majesties, Their Highnesses, and our Kingdom Seneschal, for their willingness to be guinea pigs (that’s 5 of the first 7 Kingdom email accounts moved), and for being our biggest cheerleaders. Their posts on the subject helped keep the project moving when we were otherwise stuck because of forces outside of our control.
Yours In Service,
Joel Messerer
East Kingdom Deputy Webminister for Services
FORMER Google for Nonprofits Migration Project Manager