What is Platform Innovation

The Platform Innovation sircle, as the name might suggest, is responsable for innovating Sorint’s infrastructure, but not only that, we are the group that’s always looking for new things to learn, new technologies to discover, new challenges to overcome, a group that does not back away when a new challenger shows up.

But words without a concrete example are just that, words, so let me tell the tale on how Platform Innovation faced the biggest challenge so far, the making of an entire new mail system for Sorint.

The big challenge

Migrating the mail service of a large company such as Sorint is not an easy task, but we didn’t let that scare us.

First, we had to find a new product that sited our needs, we were looking for something open source, flexible and feature rich that could be implemented in our current infrastructure.

After several days of research we stumbled upon a product that caught our interest, it had everything we wished for, it’s open source, flexible due to the use of API and orange. This product was MailCow.

Now that we had foud what we were looking for it was time to get to work. We started by preparing a test environment on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and begun our first experiments. We tested all the functionality that were already present and added new features as we went on. Once everything was setup we had to test if the machines that were hosting this new service could witstand the enormous amount of people who receive and send mails every day. The process involved some trial and error but we managed to find the right amount of computing power for the job.

Once everything was done we prepared all the guides necessary so that everybody (regardless of their mail client) could configure their environment independently.

And now that all the preparations were complete it was time to release it, tension was sky high, heart were racing. We pressed enter and the message announcing the new mail was sent to everyone.

We had did it, we created a whole new mail infrastructure in just a few months, the release went pretty smoothly, some people were having some small issues but we managed to help everyone.

And this is the story on how we created the new mail service, a challenge that seemed nearly impossible that we faced head-on and manage to overcome, an experience that taught us many new things, a journey that strengthened our group bond.

This won’t be the last challenge Platform Innovation will have to face but we welcome every new challenge with a smile and will to learn.

This is what push us forward.

This is Platform Innovation