I’m currently deeply embroiled in transitioning the company to “The Cloud”, so free time has been at a premium these last two weeks.
The difficulty has mostly come from two things: Google and Microsoft.
On the Goolag front, the company has been using G-Suite, now Google Workspace, for many years — so there’s a lot of user-land muscle-memory there that is change-resistant. Adding to the complexity is the big “G” itself being a right pain in the ass to transition out of…
See, I’m migrating the company to Office 365 and that means migrating email, contacts, files, calendars, etc, etc, out of Google. And while a user can “takeout” all of their data from Google, trusting them to know how to import it all into O365 is a bridge too far.
There’s a procedure where you create a Google Cloud ‘app’ and O365 chron process that, with domain admin rights, can set up the forwards and move all of the accumulated user-land detritus from one place to another automagically… But Google keeps breaking this functionality in the name of “security”.
It’s not a security risk if I’m setting it up, and I literally own the domain and the data I’m trying to move Google.
It’s really about the money… Goolag is hoping that if they make it onerous enough, people will simply give up and keep paying them.
Well, don’t give up so easy…
The other player in this sordid tale is Microsoft, who is still a beast of a billion heads, all retarded.
My infrastructure at work runs on a few operating systems; Linux, MacOS, and Windows — and the Windows portion is mostly 2008r2 systems running Active Directory, Terminal Services, Sharepoint, and a Windows-based file server.
Yeah, it’s 2008r2 — because I already paid the tens of thousands in licensing and it works just fine for what I need it to do… That and I briefly toyed with moving to 2012 server when it came out, but the Windows 8 UI tacked onto a server OS sucked so bad I literally burned the installer DVDs.
Anyway, this is where the problem comes in; 2008r2 fell off the support list so Microsoft has completely disowned it, but all of my accumulated user-land data is housed in a 2008r2 AD server…
O365’s “Azure”, the cloudy version of Active Directory will simply import all of that accumulated user-land data — if the AD server is running 2012r2 or later. If the server is 2008r2, you are shit outta luck.
I think I have a workaround for this too — but it involves a bunch of back-end work on my 2008r2 AD server to pull off, and I can’t do that during working hours for obvious reasons, so I’m a vampire for the foreseeable future.