In the ongoing drive at our archive to outsource anything we don’t have to maintain ourselves, we moved to a hosted email server last week. Since our physical server has been long unwarrantable (too old), and we have had our outsourced IT person on “don’t fix it unless it breaks” for a couple of years, I have been having regular nightmares about any of many disasters occurring that cause the server to die and leave us without any email for a week while we hope the backup tape is good, etc., etc., etc.
We got a taste of what “no email” means right before we switched over when our phone vendor goofed and our phone and email access were down for a day. Since we hosted our own email server, that meant not only that people who called our office got nada, but that we had no access to email and no way of telling people that we weren’t reading the email. Not good.
Hopefully, that won’t happen again. And that’s really not why I started this ramble today.
Two interesting things emerged from this excercise.
1. All staff under the age of 40 have smartphones and wanted their work email to sync with their smartphones. (Over staff over 40 with smartphones, half said, “sync,” half said “I’m okay with relying on my computer”.) Suggests that whatever we’re doing with smartphones, we might want to do more. Worrying about webpages for computer browsers may go the way of the fax–it’ll still be used, but won’t be the significant medium. Instead, we finally have a ubiquitous computing device that everyone seems to have, and seems to use as functional extensions of the brain and fingers.
2. The Law of Unintended Consequences. Did I mention that we have a lousy, slow internet connection? Imagine what happened when our small office now had to download/send all email via an external, hosted server. Yup. The coup de grace. Next step will be to add some actual bandwidth. Or move us all to smartphones.
