There are several teams that want to provide technical solution for my team in various area, and I’m thinking of adopting them or rejecting.
There is no sure rule for that, basically I need to make sure: first they perform good enough to support my products, second, they need to be quite reliable which means I will not worry about losing support, and third, they should focus on technical solution instead of trying to take product away from me.
So far the only decision had been made is that I’m going to use cloud storage team’s solution (network disk), I will put attachment for outgoing mails there to support unlimited attachment, later on will put attachments for incoming mails there. Search team also wants me leverage their platform, but I have to say their solution is not good enough for me and quite ad-hoc, so someone from my team will use Lucene to build our first solution, then we can compare to see if we are going to migrate or not.
I’m going to keep my team focus on mail/message area, thus meta data won’t be taken by anyone else. Also, anti-spam is key platform for my team so I won’t give up. For search and massive data storage in key-value pair format, I may give them out.
Tough decision though, always need to convince my team members agree that we should focus on key features instead of doing everything all by ourselves. We are still a big company and share a common platform will give the whole company a good shape of look.