stuck in the middle with you

last week i was at a meeting at one of the financials, and it was no surprise that they want to talk hard cost cutting. they want to get everything they can onto their low cost, well run MSFT platforms. at the meeting are myself and the account manager who brought me in as well as another sales rep and their accompanying talking head. it must be fun for clients to schedule dueling consultants. i know i would in their shoes.

everyone was on the same page at the start. the topic was how to get their LDAP user stores into either AD or ADAM as easily as they can. they were reserving the choice between AD or ADAM for later. the conversation strayed a bit and we were talking about how they also wanted to get SSO for their external users out of this if they could. the other consultant kept dismissing my claims that they were going to have to go through a transition period due to their stated need to keep some users on LDAP longer than others. it went in circles until i asked him to lay out his plan. “First,” he said “you move everyone to ADAM”. the head architect from the client and i smiled at each other.

wasn’t the point that they could not just “move everyone to ADAM”? so many people seem to miss the part in the middle where both the old and the new have to work together for a while. and if you can’t see that, then you’re not seeing the real problem. if we could just snap our fingers and put everyone on shiny new tech all the time, shops like QSFT would be out of business. it’s all the hard parts that people get stuck on in the middle of these projects that make it interesting…