If they’d only had a backup…
Warning: this blog post will probably only be interesting to other once and former messaging geeks. From Ed Brill:
I’m not writing about politics….
Perino said a White House review showed up to 5 million e-mails to and from as many as 1,700 executive branch employees might have been lost when the administration converted from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 and 2003.Oops.
Link: Reuters: Rove in new controversy over e-mails The email product references have since been removed from the Reuters story, but are still available in the Press gaggle transcript. There’s also some interesting commentary from a blogger who says he was directly involved with the Whitehouse mail migration. The key passage:
So unless they had wholesale corruption of the Lotus Notes storage system, Dana Perino is feeding the press a line of bull. And one other thing, the timeline here is fishy. I vaguely recall the White House started moving to our product well before I left the e-mail server team. That was over 7 years ago. If the missing e-mails are between March 2003 and October 2005 and Dana Perino is to be believed, that means that the folks at the White House were still migrating from Lotus Notes starting around 1999 to sometime between 2003 and 2005. 4 to 6 years to migrate from Lotus Notes is ridiculous.
I’ll second that, and further add that "wholesale corruption of the Lotus Notes storage system" leading to the loss of "up to 5 million" emails is equally ridiculous. Way to try and blame it on your IT guys, though - nicely done. Update April-15: fixed blogger link above.