The Air That I Breathe

EMC|ONE has become a hub for internal collaboration & communications. The community has leveraged it in ways that I'd have never imagined, and it's truly helping to drive proficiency with 2.0 tools and techniques across the global workforce.

Last week, we successfully upgraded to the latest version of our community platform. Not without it's bumps, the next gen platform offers some nifty bells and whistles that will undoubtedly be embraced by the community. For much more info, Jamie provides some play-by-play of the upgrade and shares the good and the bad from her POV.

Unfortunately, as I type this entry, I sit on a concall with our IT gang and our platform vendor dealing with a site outage. We've been down since 7AM EST (going on seven hours now) and do not have a definitive answer as to when it will be available again to the community.

I'll spare you the details...  The technical cause of the outage is not relevant here... What is relevant is the impact that it's having on the community. Folks have come to rely very heavily on EMC|ONE to collaborate, to communicate - to work.

Six or so months ago, such an outage would have been irritating. Today, it's absolutely devastating. It impacts virtually *everyone*.

The biggest challenge following this event will be assuring the community that it's OK to come back... That their information is safe... Their conversations and comments still intact... That actions will be taken to avoid another outage... And that they indeed can rely on a healthy and stable community offering.

So, my advice for those who are still in the early phases of community development... Know that your community will likely become the equivalent of air to your organization. It will become so engrained in your daily lives that living without it will seem like an impossibility. Consider this early and often - and do whatever you can to mitigate the situation we're currently in.

The system outage itself will be dealt with... It's the damage to the confidence of the community that's a larger concern to me.

Comments

[Tom Diederich]

Hi Len,

Sorry to hear about your community site outage. Does your IT team host it on your own servers or is it hosted by your community platform vendor?

As a former community manager, I've worked in both scenarios -- I've found the hosted option more reliable in terms of uptime.

[Len Devanna]

Hi Tom - Thanks for stopping by.

We're hosting internally... But may need to rethink that strategy.

[Tim Levad]

Thanks for sharing the good, the bad and the ugly with us Len. We're working with Jive on a broad Clearspace launch right now. I'd love to get a deeper view of your thoughts about the platform, but even more, I'd like to hear more about how your community(s) has reacted to this downtime.

Will you please come back in a week or so, when the waters have calmed, and give us a read-out on how the community has recovered/suffered?

Stories like these make the potential impact of collaborative communities all the more real, even though the circustances may not be the best.

You don't miss it 'til it's gone, right?

Thanks!

[Len Devanna]

Tim - Absolutely will do! The good news as of Wednesday morning, the community is thriving - conversations are flowing - and things seem to be returning to normal.

Having said that, the interruption clearly had an impact. Once it returned to service, there were some interesting discussions around the work that stopped due to the outage... Really helped give exposure to the massive ripple effects.