How do you gracefully upgrade mission critical systems to wildly disparate systems?
- by Ernie
In the span of the 12+ years of my career, I have yet to overcome this hurdle and I suspect the answer simply isn't easy or even possible, so I ask everyone here for their experience.
Say that you're running into egregious problems that can only be fixed by moving from one platform to another - either from making a mistake in choosing the platform that was chosen years ago, or simply growing beyond what the system was originally designed for. You know for certain that the cruft that has built up over time will invariably mean that it will be nearly impossible to test for all the things that will certainly lead to tech support hell - which we all know leads to the loss of customers. Not that customers aren't already complaining about the egregious problems that already exist!
The best possible way that I've discovered so far is to maybe devise a plan for the changeover, test it on a few clients, test it on a dozen clients, test it on a hundred clients, then finally finish the changeover for everyone and pray that you've worked out all the bugs with those first hundred and twenty, and that the animal by-products will not hit the ventilation system in the most spectacular fashion possible.
However, that doesn't mean that it won't anyway.
So say that you're moving from Exchange to Exim (or even just Sendmail to Exim). How do you handle it?
