Presentation: "Google Apps’ Identity Crisis"
Track:
Tales from Silicon Valley
Time: Thursday 16:10 - 17:00
Location: Seacliff AB
Abstract: For many years, Google Apps customers couldn’t
access the majority of Google’s vast services without reverting to their
personal accounts. This was due to an early, identity-related design
decision which led to the need for one of the largest and most complicated user
migration and code refactoring in Google’s history. This identity crisis
isn’t unique to Google though, and can affect many web services that exist
today. The vast majority of online apps assume that users only have one
persona while accessing the service, but that is rapidly changing. As
businesses, schools and other organizations move to the cloud, more users will
be accessing the same service in different contexts. For example, a user
who uses a photo service to store both her personal photos and her employer’s
marketing albums. Google Apps was one of the first online services to
cater to both consumer and business users at the same time, and as a pioneer,
made and learned from early mistakes. Come listen to the lessons learned
plus how Google executed this 4+ year migration which included 6 separate
internal projects, involved dozens of teams, scores of codebases, over 4
million organizations, and in excess of 40 million active users.