Ask Slashdot: How To Turn an Email Stash Into Knowledge For My Successor? 203
VoiceOfDoom writes: I'm leaving my current position in a few weeks and it looks unlikely that a replacement will be found in time. My job is very specialized and I'm the only person in the organization who is qualified or experienced in how to do it. I'd like to share as much of my accumulated knowledge with my successor as possible but at the moment, it mostly exists in my email archive which will be deleted after I've been gone for 90 days.
The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems so the only way it seems I can pass on this information is by copying all the info into a series of documents, which isn't much fun to do in Outlook. Can my fellow Slashdotters can suggest a better approach? By the way, there's quite a lot of confidential stuff in there that my successor needs to know but which cannot leave the organization's existing systems.
The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems so the only way it seems I can pass on this information is by copying all the info into a series of documents, which isn't much fun to do in Outlook. Can my fellow Slashdotters can suggest a better approach? By the way, there's quite a lot of confidential stuff in there that my successor needs to know but which cannot leave the organization's existing systems.
Okaaay. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm leaving my current position in a few weeks and it looks unlikely that a replacement will be found in time. My job is very specialized and I'm the only person in the organization who is qualified or experienced in how to do it
Look, it's "I'm a Special Little Snowflake" syndrome.
Also, didn't we get a similar question to this last month (How to leave my technical knowledge, that is not documented on any company-wide system for some reason, to my replacement)?
Re:Okaaay. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that you, the person leaving, are the only one who has this on their radar. Management doesn't know what you do, doesn't have a plan for when you leave, and will not ask you for help down the line. So while it's commendable, it's not going to amount to a hill of beans no matter what you do.
CAPTCHA: realist
Re:Okaaay. (Score:5, Informative)
Management may very well ask for help in the future. At which point you tell them "$200/hour, 4 hour minimum".
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This, right here.
Your obligations end the moment they stop paying you. Anything else is free labor on your part.
Re:Okaaay. (Score:5, Insightful)
This, right here. Your obligations end the moment they stop paying you. Anything else is free labor on your part.
Of course it does. But as long as I'm getting paid I will act professionally and loyally to my soon to be ex-employer, unless I got reason to feel stabbed in the back anyway. It's not like I waited for things to crash and burn then tell my boss "You didn't tell me to do anything about it" before, so I wouldn't be that way in my resignation period either. If they'll listen is another matter, but pretty soon that won't be my problem. It's not really about that company's future, I do it because if I cross paths with my boss or colleagues later they might have a more positive opinion of me.
It certainly can't hurt and whether my boss deserves it or not isn't really relevant, I might think he's a short sighted and ignorant PHB but that doesn't preclude him from being involved in a hiring decision about me. I know for a fact that companies look for current employees that have a shared work history with you and ask their opinion of you, since that way they get a reference you don't control. It of course depends on your field of expertise and mobility, but it's usually hard to avoid having a reputation so best to make it a good one. Unless you really need to burn those bridges and rise from the ashes.
Re:Okaaay. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dang! Smartest comment I've read so far. Me? I only have 30-40 years computer experience. Moved around a lot. But I keep running into former co-workers, vendors etc. So the teen age kid from India I met on IRC circa late 1990s is now someone important at MS. Or the guy I met on IRC from Finland, well I got ill when we were thinking of visiting Linus. Doesn't matter. Your rep will follow you. And I stand by my rep, despite moving around all over North America (and friends all over the world). Of course, my ex-wife, the RN and MD, and my current wife don't view me the same way lol.
Re: (Score:3)
If it's in Outlook, save everything in a PST file. Burn the PST file to a DVD, and tell your boss (before you leave) "Bob, eventually you're going to want this stuff. Here you go, and think of me when you open it." Give him the DVD, smile, shake hands, and sail off into the sunset. If Bob gives the DVD to whoever inherits your job, then the knowledge transfer will have been accomplished.
If you're in California, drop me a line; my company sells document management systems. We may be able to hook you up
Re:Okaaay. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I burned my emails to a .pst and took a copy with me when I left an employer in the 2001 dot.com bust.
Unfortunately, since then my work is all Linux and I have never found a program which will properly read that .pst file.
You might want to find some other way of exporting the info.
Re: (Score:2)
Huge respect for you sir. This is how an IT professional behaves. Since it is Outlook I would just throw it all into a pst to preserve the information. Put it on a USB stick and give it to your current boss. Even if he doesn't understand or see the value in it now he will one day. Do not leave the building with the USB stick as it is all company information anyway. You could even send them a signed email from your personal email account on what you have provided them and why and how to reach you shou
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly. Let the company burn, if he really is that irreplaceable. They should have been more aggressive in finding a replacement, and more importantly, they should have listened to his advice. He's obviously screaming to them that all this domain knowledge will be lost because of their shitty IT systems and idiotic automatic 90-day email deletion policy. Let management suffer with the effects of their own dumb policies. This guy sounds like he's done all he can to warn management and try to help smoot
Re: (Score:3)
I was with you in the first part, but you lost me at "WAY, WAY...".
I get about a hundred emails a day, many with useful information. It's easy for me to search back by name, topic or chronologically, or even follow the flow of the discussion. How much of my time should I devote to transferring this knowledge and what tool(s) would you recommend. I'm stuck using Windows, though most of our systems are *NIX, and I can't transfer mail to them...they belong to customers. As the systems I work on have about
Re: (Score:2)
Ever seen a grain elevator fire?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This guy just needs to leave. I left my old job, I too was a "special snowflake", I got 4 phone calls and helped for a total of maybe 2 hours after I left. They figured it out. Trust me you are not that special, period. Either the things you are doing are not actually critical to the company and will fall by the wayside or someone will figure out how to connect point A to point B and get the same result. It'll be a learning curve for them, but they'll survive. They did so without you before and will d
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, maybe not. There's definitely nothing wrong, and it's actually commendable IMO, that he's trying to make things better for his employer so they're not completely screwed (in his opinion) after he leaves. However, if they're so dumb they don't want to actually follow his advice regarding data retention and would rather blindly follow dumb policies and then have to reinvent the wheel later, there isn't much he can do about that, nor should he. Management is supposed to be competent enough to handle
Re: (Score:2)
They're surviving because the product line is planned several years ahead. Give it a few more.
Re:Okaaay. (Score:5, Interesting)
Kinda harsh - I don't think of myself as any kind of snowflake and we're not talking about technical IT knowledge here but understanding of privacy law and how it applies to a pretty unique non-profit health and social care organisation.
No doubt any other data protection expert can come in and suss it all out - just thought it might benefit the organisation if the learning curve for the new bod were a little less steep.....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't confuse stupidity with a lack of caring. They probably won't know what they've lost until they can't find it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I bet the company uses Microsoft Office therefore import all the important emails into Microsoft OneNote and the successor will have a tidy, easy-to-read archive of all the relevant information. The Microsoft OneNote document can be put on a network share or handed off to a colleague in the interim.
Re: (Score:2)
.pst? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:.pst? (Score:5, Insightful)
also you can convert the .pst into html and put it on the company intranet if that's more palatable.
https://www.google.com/webhp?h... [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just barf it out to multiple
Done and done.
HARUMPH!
Re: (Score:2)
I know plenty of people with 40GB PSTs too, you haven't been limited to 2gb since Office 2007
But sometimes Outlook ends up in "compatability" format and will screw up at 2GB.
If I were using Outlook at work, I'd probably partition my emails off into PSTs by calender year. That way I can have a fixed archive for previous years. I partition off "My documents" by year as well.
Is .pst standard? How about mbox or Maildir? (Score:3)
But is .pst the best format to do that?
Personally I'd prefer a Maildir [wikipedia.org] or mbox [wikipedia.org] or MIX [wikipedia.org] as the export format.
Re:.pst? probably doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Who sings praises for their fiance's ex-boyfriends?
My ex-wife's new husband sang my praises much to her dismay :-)
(Nice guy, as I eventually found out. Drove a daihatsu (sp?)).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most people know how to search their mail in Google. It takes a particular skill that you have and most people don't have to search their mail in Outlook. I think there's a search problem in Outlook here. It's a solved problem; we have exemplars of good solutions.
Forward to someone who will be around... (Score:2, Insightful)
Particular answer (Score:4, Insightful)
On one hand, it seems like an honorable request to establish a knowledge base that shares institutional and situational history with your successor.
For the organization, however, it represents a responsibility that they should somehow be shouldering. If indeed they sanction this, may I suggest considering transferable knowledge base software like Evernote, or the like, to feed docs, URLs, workflow information, and so forth. Email histories have legal status, and so you must be careful as to what's transferred, subject to the jurisdictions and audit/regulatory authorities involved-- in other words, a legal problem.
Well ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can print them. You can forward them. You can paste them into a document and pass them on.
Or you can realize that if the company doesn't care enough to have a replacement hired, or a system in place to store this knowledge ... they either don't know or don't care enough to plan for this.
Ask your manager, if his response is "gee, I don't know, I'll get back to you" ... well, then it's their damned problem.
Wanting to make transition is a nice thing, but at a certain point, your employer also has to take ownership of that process.
At a certain point, hand holding your employer through such things isn't really your problem.
Re:Well ... (Score:5, Insightful)
if the company doesn't care enough to have a replacement hired, or a system in place to store this knowledge ... they either don't know or don't care enough to plan for this.
I almost took this attitude the last time I changed jobs, but I realized it wasn't to help the company as a whole or my manager. It was for my immediate colleagues and juniors who would have to fill in. They were the ones who could make the most use and who appreciated the extra transition effort.
Re: (Score:2)
This right here. Nobody really is in love with the company in general, but it is the people you've worked with and for that actually might have made working there tolerable. The last thing I wanted to do leaving a long position I had was strand any one of them by being lackadaisical during my final two weeks.
Re: (Score:2)
Or... how about take on the hard job and documenting your job?
Right now, the information to do your job is spread across millions of emails and no matter who your replacement is, it's going to take forever to read it all.
So why not sit down, and write down everything you know. Print it out and if there's email to go along with it, print it out and stick it in the binder with your instructions.
Have it serve as the "owner's manual" for your job. Your replacement will be glad to have such a nice document to ge
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Your boss has told you he doesn't want any notice. That's what they are saying when they immediately fire anybody who gives notice.
Consulting (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Do your best to store it where it won't get deleted
2) Sign an agreement with them on your billing rate if they call you for help
3) Don't look back unless they call
This should be SOP. BTW, they usually don't call.
Re: (Score:3)
BTW, they usually don't call.
And if you check in on them, it's likely to be like This scene from the film About Schmidt [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The sadness when you realize you can be, and have been replaced.
Re:Consulting (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree mostly. Sort of.
The problem with it, if I'm being honest, is that I want to do a good job. I don't want to screw things up for my employer, especially if I have a decent relationship with them. So if they say, for example, "Hey, go ahead and delete these files," and I know those files are very important, I'm not going to just delete them without saying anything, wait for them to discover the problem, and then say, "Well you told me to do it!" I'm going to give them a big warning that they've just asked me to do something stupid. I may even fight them on it a bit.
Now if they absolutely insist that I delete important information, I might go ahead and do it. I'd probably say, as the last thing I do before deleting it, "Just to be clear, I'm doing this at your request, overriding my own objections." I might even put that in writing.
To me, that kind of conscientiousness shouldn't end when you start planning to leave your company. So in that vein, I agree with you, with the assumption that you're also informing the employer what you're doing, and making it clear why you're doing it. Tell them, "I'm saving these documents here. These are important for my successor. I don't recommend deleting them, since then my successor may have trouble doing [whatever]. Would you prefer that I store them anywhere else?" If they ignore that and delete the files, then that's their own fault, and you charge consulting fees for helping them.
I also agree that they probably won't hire you on as a consultant. No matter how indispensable you are, the graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with what you said. I always try and do my best for my current employer as well. Someone else in the thread said, your stuff should be documented as part of your job. When you get to the point of leaving, you should not be starting the documentation, just have to be organizing it for the next guy. Maybe a nice book that says where everything is so the next guy can find it.
If it is more then that, you have missed the boat already and your predecessor will be cursing you to for the next 2 years, s
Re: (Score:2)
On a different level, since when is important technical documentation solely stored on the company email server anyway?
Yeah, but in reality, there's always a bunch of random bits of information that aren't very well documented, appearing only in someone's head or in an email message, that somehow you just haven't gotten around to writing good documentation for it. It's usually not super-important, but when you're leaving a job, you should search through your head and try to get that stuff down as much as possible. And that's the best possible scenario. The reality is that most documentation is terrible or non-existent.
Re: (Score:2)
Good thing I'm female then! ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
In a couple of major companies where I worked, I archived all my code before leaving, burned them to CDs, and gave two copies to my manager. And I kept a copy for me. I copied them on my home discs, automatically backed up, and left them there.
In both case, the companies lost the copies, and came back to me offering money - years later. And yes, I took it!
It's a sensible idea to have offsite backups - and taking copies home is a good way to do that. Could be illegal, theoretically, but really, what would yo
Re:Consulting (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, they usually don't call.
The reason they don't call is that really special people are usually no where near as special and indispensable as they think they are. 80% of what they were frittering their time away on wasn't worth doing in the first place, and the remaining 20% can be streamlined and done faster/cheaper/better by their replacement, using their own methods.
Re: (Score:2)
The reason they don't call is that really special people are usually no where near as special and indispensable as they think they are. 80% of what they were frittering their time away on wasn't worth doing in the first place, and the remaining 20% can be streamlined and done faster/cheaper/better by their replacement, using their own methods.
Even if you leave on good terms, you are usually leaving because somebody offered you a better deal, I guess there's a few exceptions where you're moving far away or retiring but usually not. Your manager knows this, it's like bringing your ex-girlfriend flowers and candy after she broke up with you for not paying enough attention to her. Also it implies you're the well-meaning employee and the manager the poor manager for undervaluing the work you do and putting the company in a situation where they're cri
Re: (Score:2)
You've got to think a one off job that's best covered by email is a position ripe for elimination. On the other hand, even if a person was better than sliced bread he's still dispensable in that in most cases a company will find a way to muddle along without him.
Re: (Score:2)
Went back did a look and check of the system and then asked for where they put all the documentation and notes I had left. They spend a few days digging those up and then we went through them showing them the steps to follow to correct what they wanted done.
This is your manager's problem (Score:5, Insightful)
>> I'd like to share as much of my accumulated knowledge with my successor as possible
Don't worry about it unless your manager told you to do so. (Your manager knows you're leaving right? And you've told your manager that there might be useful info your email, right?)
>> The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems
Don't worry about this either. These are all overrated and highly ignored by most organizations that own them anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
I recently left a job after 7 years and I totally understand the OPs point. It does wear off after about 2 days at your new job though.
Create a wiki? (Score:2)
Since there may be legal items with just archiving a PST file and leaving it for a successor, it may take some time, but creating an internal wiki on a secure computer may be the best thing, even if it just is copying documents from E-mail attachments and throwing them in the wiki's file structure.
Re: (Score:3)
You know, creating a wiki for your employer a few weeks before they're no longer your employer is misguided and pointless.
Fixing everything the company failed to do now that you're leaving is a sucker's game of diminishing returns.
Taking on new projects to benefit them because nobody has figured out how to plan for your leaving? Well, sure if you think you want to start creating something like this now ... and which in all likelihood will go unused after you're gone.
Mostly you'll just throw good time after
Re: (Score:2)
Very true. However, it is a karma thing, because it makes life easier for the person who is cleaning up the mess.
It also makes life easier when the next potential employer calls the previous employer for reference checking, and even though technically there is only a limited things that can be asked for, there are ways to communicate about people's performance (or lack of without worrying about a lawsuit. Silence is one way, or the statement "works well when supervised" is another.)
Make it fun! (Score:2, Funny)
Print out all of your emails on 4x6 cardstock and bundle them up by conversation thread.
Wrap them in newspaper and stash them in various forgotten corners of the office.
Attach to teach cryptic notes that give directions to where he(or she) can find the next bundle.
It will be like a scavenger hunt! What fun!
Re: (Score:2)
for that very reason, I take my company emails, tar them up, call them wumpus.tar and have them hunt thru them all they want!
btw, there is ZERO company loyalty, so I won't spend any time caring about what the employer is left with. more often than not, its the employer that cuts YOU loose, not the other way around. after a few rounds of that, you give up even caring about the employer anymore. pay me and I'll work for you but if you cut me loose, I owe you nothing from that point onward. I know they fee
Can you categorize into PST files? (Score:2)
I don't know what the information is, or how it could be organized, but maybe you could add a series of PST data files in Outlook to categorize the emails, and then save each PST at appropriate, somewhat permanent network locations.
Permissions... (Score:3)
Work with your exchange admin to give your replacement permissions to your inbox. They can then open it as a second mailbox. Make sure that you delete any personal stuff first.
Another option is to have your Exchange admin create a public folder and only give permissions to you and your replacement. You can then move the email into the public folder and have shared access until you leave.
Those are the only two methods that I can think of where the information would not leave the Exchange system. Typically, this is done by exporting email from the old mailbox and importing it into the new using a PST file, but the email is temporarily outside of the system during this process.
Re: (Score:2)
Or create a separate role-based rather than individual-based email account (say widgetPolisher@yourcompany.com) that your manager owns (so it persists even after you've left) and to which you forward emails (ideally to be automatically filtered into categories) that are relevant to your work. That way you don't need to worry about forgetting to delete a personal item and having it forwarded on to your replacement.
Re: (Score:2)
Ever since Exchange 2007 came a long its been a few trivial powershell commands to copy the contents of one mailbox into another. What he probably should do is have his exchange admin copy his mails to a folder in his managers mailbox; so they won't be subject to delete.
That way the person likely to be responsible for anything the submitter would have been will have the information at his finger tips, and in a format that is easy to forward the relevant parts to whomever (s)he finds to do the actual work.
O
Yes, but a slip can muck up the mail of others (Score:2)
Ever since Sendmail 1983 came along it's also been trivial to use any shell to copy the contents of one mailbox into another - but in this case since the mailboxes are not separate files the user is probably better off not fucking about with commands to manipulate email in an obfiscated database with other people's stuff in it and instead export directly from their mail client.
If
30 reams of paper (Score:2)
Load your printer up, select all the emails, and print them off. You'll probably want to position an "in" basket to catch all the sheets in order. Or, maybe thirty "in" baskets, or more. Stack baskets neatly on corner of desk. Job complete.
For shits and giggles, you could load the printer with disappearing ink.
Export your email to a .pst file.. (Score:2)
Affinity diagram (Score:2)
Documentation? Wiki? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a total failure to document anything....
Everywhere I've worked in the past few jobs I've had, processes and procedures and anything important about business process has to be documented on a wiki (or more recently, everyone seems to have gone to confluence) and documenation is considered REALLY important.
Sounds like the places I've worked have learned the value of employee knowledge and suffered from employees leaving with vital knowledge not documented.
You either work for either a really tiny organisation, or a business that just hasn't suffered through an important person with a lot of important knowledge leaving.
Oh well. Their problem.
Move on and forget your current employer.
Not Your Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Do what fits your former company's style (Score:2)
First, I know people are telling this guy to just walk away without documenting anything, but I think he's doing the right thing. Yes, there's no employee/employer loyalty anymore, but I've worked with a bunch of people that I would never consider working with again because of their actions or attitude. Even in a big industry, I'm amazed how many times I've run into people from former employers...and reputations do follow you. You don't want to be remembered as they guy whose mass of scripting blew up 3 day
Just be like Hillary... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly more reliable for her and her interests.
Let's turn the question around! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's turn the question around!
Hi.
I'm an employer who intends to fire someone, but they don't know it yet, and I don't want to clue them into it by bringing in their successor ahead of time, for fear of what their reaction might be, or what they might delete.
I have access to all of their company email, since it's stored on a central server, and I want to know how to turn this stash of email into a set of useful instructions for their successor.
Can anyone help? It's really annoying when there is someone in a critical position that you hate enough that you want to get rid of them, and they hate you enough that you can't trust them to "play nice".
Does that about sum up the actual situation?
Re: (Score:2)
One of my favorite tools for storing knowledge (Score:2)
http://zim-wiki.org/ [zim-wiki.org]
Personal desktop wiki that stores everything in flat text files, which can be stored somewhere like dropbox. My full review here: http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com... [tidbitsfortechs.com]
translation: (Score:2)
Contract with Them And Be Your Own Successor (Score:2)
If you can setup a contracting agreement with your soon-to-be-previous employer, then you can be your own successor!
Seriously, this constantly happens when people decide to leave their employment to go out on their own. It happened with me when I quit my 9-5 to take the plunge, and I've seen it happen with every other person I've directly witnessed quitting a job to pursue contracting full time (three total, other than myself.)
Swap days with future employer (Score:2)
I have arranged this with a few employees from both directions when a replacement was not found in time.
Start doing a few days at your new job early (before the agreed upon date) they don't have to be in a row.
And return these days after a replacement has been found (but no more then two months after you start the new job or such like).
The new employer is likely to agree, it allows you to get into things sooner, and can prevent first week stagnation since you will be on boarding gradually.
It is common after
mail archive, web index. (Score:2)
use some tool to convert the mail to html and then some other tool to make it searchable, pat yourself on the back and call it done. if you really wanted a knowledge base you would have built one a long time ago. now it's just a makework project.
On the other hand, if you need something to do, do the first part and then proceed to build an intelligent index of the contents in the CMS of your choice.
Either way, preserving the emails themselves preserves context which might help later technicians comprehend th
Convert to PDFs (Score:2)
A handy program is ABC Amber [processtext.com]. It can convert a variety of email archives(outlook, BlackBerry, Groupwise etc) into a number of different formats including HTML and PDFs. The PDF feature is nice as it links to the attachments. It allows bulk operations and seems to be very fast.
memcpy(); (Score:2)
Just raw copy the bytes to his drive. It's always a solid plan!
Delete everything (Score:2)
Easy answer (Score:2)
Turn off the light and go home. (Score:2, Insightful)
It is no longer your problem.
Try not to worry so much (Score:3)
no matter what you do whoever takes your place is going to have to stand the process his or her own way. As the say, the graveyard is full of people who were thought of as irreplaceable...
Are you... (Score:4, Funny)
Hillary Clinton?
Outlook not so good - write a summary (Score:2)
my solution (Score:2)
Get Management to make a decision... (Score:3)
If the role is really THAT specialized, then presumably they have agreed some kind of agreement where the new hire can call you during their first 6 months(?) of ramp up time, when they have questions (and that should be something they compensate you for in an appropriate and mutually agreed manner). Aside from that, securing the knowledge base is vital, so your manager (and the manager/owner of the system you are supporting, if that is not your manager) need to request/authorize the retention of your email account beyond the 90 day period. Typically that would involve getting IT to transfer ownership of the mailbox over to the manager/owner, and when the new hire starts granting access to them.
As long as they advise you in writing that, as of your last day on the job, you forfeit ownership, control, access and rights to all content of your mailbox and get your signature to agree to that, most HR departments and HR legal specialists will be ok with that afaik.
Once the knowledge base is out of your hands, it ceases to be your problem though, so management need to own the process of securing and preserving the knowledge, something they seem to have done a piss poor job of to date.
Export the email to a PST file. (Score:2)
Dump to mbox, filter and format with regexes. (Score:2)
Dump your mail to mbox, filter and format the mbox dump with regexes, as to make it more readable.
Save it as a regular textfile.
Tell your successor he can search that for keywords if he suspects an answer in there.
That shouldn't take you more than a day or two, perhaps only 2 hours or so.
Re: (Score:2)
There's really two problems with consulting for the old company. Firstly it's just going to be distracting to the process of acclimating to your new role, company and peers. Secondly it does not sound like, in general, the company is very efficient to begin with. It may take much longer than anyone expects to find and hire a replacement. As time progresses many of the minute details of that knowledge will fade.
Documentation and email never forgets the details you put in them. Create a backup and give it to
I say you (plural) have already failed (Score:2, Interesting)
Part of doing the job responsibly, especially for such highly special specialist jobs, is to keep documentation. So if all you have is a large bundle of messages* in some proprietary format that may or may not survive the upgrade to the next version of the required proprietary software, you have essentially already failed your duty of keeping reasonable documentation.
Maybe my sysadmin background is showing, but I do expect site documentation to exist, and if it doesn't, I will start it first thing, and I wi
Re: (Score:2)
git is awesome for documentation. I do this.
DON'T do anything without authorization (Score:2)
Um... archive it and let them search it? Lol
NO. Do not.
Your company has a data retention/destruction policy. Any of your emails can come up in a lawsuit against the company in the future, for example, which is almost certainly why they have a policy of destroying data. Do NOT violate their data policy without permission in writing that you keep a record of in your personal files. You don't want to get stuck with the bill for a lawsuit, or be known as the person responsible for the company losing one.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep - this is (well, mostly) correct. Check the policy before you act. Unless they're a F500 corporation, I sincerely doubt they could practically bring such a lawsuit against you after losing theirs (let alone win one), it's better to keep your six clear.
Besides, I've always subscribed to the policy that if that's how they want it, that's how they get it.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess the cron job to DBAN all the servers never kicked in.