Update on recent customer issues…

re: Update on recent customer issues…

bradleym — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:35:43 GMT

Looks like you've got another outage on your hands, Rajesh. The part that ticks me off is that I can't even see your stupid Service Health Dashboard because I'm not an O365 user. However, my hundreds of in-house mail users get upset with me because they get NDR's trying to send a simple message to one of the poor saps who signed up for your service.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Arul Daniel — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:43:49 GMT

Nov 20th - 10:40 AM - Hey guys was there a 15 minute blip @ 9:45 am today for 15 minutes? Can someone confirm?

Thanks,

Amyris IT Team

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Jared Hall — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:56:54 GMT

As an admin to our O365 E1 environment, a few thoughts around the incidents and this posting:

1) The detailed explanation and transparency here as to what happened is appreciated.

2) The Service Health page is typically the first place I look when I hear of a potential platform issue, not so much for the actions being taken to resolve, but to correlate any possible maintenance activity around the timeframe in question.

3) From an administrative standpoint, our company would benefit more from timely, accurate data on the Service Health pages as opposed to messages broadcast on other channels (Twitter, RSS, etc).

4) Twitter as an abbreviated emergency broadcast channel could be improved by a dedicated Service Health account (to distinguish it from advertising as another poster points out), and/or hashtags to match the ticket number (#SP2598 for example) so we could correlate a message stream directly with the incident in question.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

itjackie — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:52:18 GMT

My name is Jackie Wong locate in Hong Kong. Seems this problem impact our locate in Singapore Datacentre Mailbox . A user reported mailbox cannot send out start from 7 Nov PM to 8 Nov PM.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

zwittiker — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:54:42 GMT

Rejesh,

Thanks for the update, but you seriously need to spend this weekend looking at how other large organizations communicate with customers during an outage. Many of us are MSP's and we had absolutely zero information to give our customers.

Go look at the tremendous job utilities, wireless providers and data-centers( peer1 squarespace etc.) handled outages during the recent east coast storm. They all used twitter, blogs, facebook, etc. to keep us up to date and informed.

Post -Mortem has very little customer value...I simply assume you learned something and it won't happen again. Give me information during the outage.

Charles

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Dan Martin — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:45:11 GMT

The transparency is couched in spin "we have not satisfied our customers' needs" means that there is no stinkin way to get your email, and on the east coast, it came up after you left the office.

The only question of meeting Service Level Agreements is will there be another outage before the end of the month.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Steve Berman — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:05:32 GMT

Hello Rajesh and the Office365 team.

First let me say that I am truly sad to say that for me as a Partner with Microsoft for

very long time, it makes me very irritated when Microsoft makes explanations the way of

compensation for what we are calling the “BLACK WEDNESDAY INCIDENT” of Office365.

I can truly tell you just don’t get it. So as a result the clients I work for and pay my bills that they will be leaving Office365 very soon.

1) Again just to review any outage that results in loss of communication should be a complete credit of the month of service or better. Microsoft needs to feel it. Partners and clients this business are at loss more than double because of the time spent trying to find out the problem and then working around a fix for the issues because of it. Maybe the IT at Microsoft should think of it like a person on a breathing machine, if the machine stops for just a few minutes he dies. Any outage is not accepted. This is MICROSOFT you can’t tell me you don’t have the resources to have the Exchange Server do a confidence check for the health of the system and then warning us of trouble and then applying a fix.

2) You need to understand that as partners we deal with the clients every day.

If the there is a problem we fix it. That means a work around is put in place that minute instead of reasons for the outage several days later. Don’t get me wrong it’s great as an IT person to know why the problem happened. But because of the outage and many more Brown outages not spoken about many of my clients are going to another provider for the service already as they needed something as a way to communicate. In my line of work that means a loss of revenue and confidence in my ability to business. If the outage is treated any less that that then you just don’t get it. Please think of it like you were supplying air to breathe. A message to a company trading stock or message for a notary to go to a loan signing or a message for a client telling me of an issue with Office365 does not get seen because of the outage will not be accepted.

Wake up MICROSOFT this was yours and my “BLACK WEDNESDAY INCIDENT”.

Because this message comes from my clients! Remember that.

Sadly,

Steve Berman

Quick’n Computer Service

503-679-8882 Is my Cell

steve@qcsl.biz via 1and1.com

steve@quickncomputer.com via Office365

Which account do you think my clients will email me on?

It’s just that simple.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Jay Brown — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:39:56 GMT

Morgan,

Following @Office365, really?

The amount of information on Twitter was insufficient and not timely. But what is worse is that the marketing machine of Microsoft uses that moniker to advertise, so the signal-to-noise ratio is inadequate to serve as a telegraph of a problem. Three tweets over the duration of the outage is hardly overwhelming anyone with actionable information.

During an outage, we the management of the companies that have entrusted Microsoft to run this environment, need real time information that we can use to manage the outage within our respective companies. Unfortunately, that’s not the first time you heard that from me.

-J

re: Update on recent customer issues…

MorganCole — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 03:09:48 GMT

Hi Karen

This is great feedback that we will consider for future service incidents that warrant proactive Twitter posts. I appreciate you taking the time to provide your perspective. One of the challenges to coherent communication is to coordinate all of the different communication channels in the midst of a significant service incident, particularly to match the level and depth expected from customers and partners. We try to use the Twitter handle as an 'emergency broadcast system' to alert the broadest set of community members to a potential issue. Along with that, we try to maintain an active presence in our community forums and update the Service Health Dashboard regularly. As others have noted, we need improvement in the timeliness of our SHD updates, and we'll work hard in future events to fulfill that requirement. We definitely recognize that it's critical to keep customers and partners well-informed in the case of any service issue, so we'll take your feedback as concrete recommendations on ways to improve.

re: Update on recent customer issues…

Steve Lentz — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 01:07:42 GMT

I would like to re-iterate the poor communication Microsoft provides with the Office365 offering from an operational standpoint. The dashboard is never updated in a timely manner or contains accurate times for the outage. This is not an isolated incident but has become common place. I've grown tired of the constant apologies and need to see real change. If my customer service, communications and sense of urgency is as poor as the O365 operations team I would be unemployed.