Most IT departments have the best intentions of providing the best quality, coherent solutions, yet market conditions, projects running in parallel and various constraints on budgets, resources or time, often causes what might be defined as Accidental Architecture.
The easiest way to identify cases where you’ve been hit by accidental architecture is when describing your it architecture and look for the works “except” or “but not”. Typical examples include - we have a single-sign system utilized everywhere except…”, “We update all systems to current versions, but not this old system…”.
It seems to be quite popular to move away from custom build IT solutions to so called COTS - commercial of the shelf solutions. The idea being, that to software solution fulfil a functionality which long has been commoditized and standardized to such an extent that it offers no “competitive edge” nor core value to the business.
For most companies and organizations the office suite would be a pretty safe bet for a piece of software which is magnificently suited for a COTS solution.
Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled.
(In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.