Poor issue management with Office 365

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Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1307753 19-May-2015 12:46

I'm actually not saying that Office 365 is a bad product or the services shouldn't be used. I've used it since it first was released as Office 365 and this is actually the first time I've had to log a call. So that in itself is great.

As the subject says though this is around poor issue management. I understand that DNS management is no longer in the new products and that there are other ways to skin this but it is still a service that is being delivered by MS that has had a fault of upwards of 3 weeks now.

My fear is that if there is another issue with Office 365 which is not a large public impact that it may be dealt with in a similiar way. ie. Long outage times, and bad communications which isn't really acceptable. What if this problem had implications on my business? A 3 week email outage that only impacts me would be huge to me financially but would it get any serious attention from support since it's just a single user? Would I need to be looking at migrating off Office 365 just to keep going?

To my view there are definitely communications issues inside the Office 365 support team which need addressing, but since most of the time we don't need to deal with them this wasn't obvious. A scary thought.

Dulouz

883 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1307790 19-May-2015 14:22

I had a similar experience with Outlook for Mac using Office 365. A MS update released in April made it unusable. It then took 4 weeks for MS to release an update that did work. During this time there was very little to no communication from MS about the issue.

For more info - http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macofficeo365-macoutlook/outlook-for-mac-159-crashes-at-startup-when/a5697ac3-0135-4890-bbdc-56202a8d0644

Amanon

paulb001

40 posts

Geek

Trusted

#1308101 20-May-2015 00:43

Klathman: I'm actually not saying that Office 365 is a bad product or the services shouldn't be used. I've used it since it first was released as Office 365 and this is actually the first time I've had to log a call. So that in itself is great.

As the subject says though this is around poor issue management. I understand that DNS management is no longer in the new products and that there are other ways to skin this but it is still a service that is being delivered by MS that has had a fault of upwards of 3 weeks now.

My fear is that if there is another issue with Office 365 which is not a large public impact that it may be dealt with in a similiar way. ie. Long outage times, and bad communications which isn't really acceptable. What if this problem had implications on my business? A 3 week email outage that only impacts me would be huge to me financially but would it get any serious attention from support since it's just a single user? Would I need to be looking at migrating off Office 365 just to keep going?

To my view there are definitely communications issues inside the Office 365 support team which need addressing, but since most of the time we don't need to deal with them this wasn't obvious. A scary thought.

Hi Bryan, sorry once again you have had issues with our 365 service and support, I agree that our support teams could have been more proactive in communicating with you and we want to ensure they are working in a timely manner, however from time to time there will be issues and support simply cannot be across all of the backend services at this granular level (we run literally millions and millions of mailbox's on hundreds of thousands of tenants). Not an excuse but the issue itself impacted a very small number of customers (very few customers use DNS from us or the old plans) and as mentioned last week, we aimed to have this bug fixed by end of last week, which we resolved on Friday US time/Sat APAC time. I understand our support team had a call with you this evening to cover this.

Rest assured that we have a robust process for managing service outages as can be evidenced by our support levels and response in the past, You can view our service levels and uptime history at: http://trustoffice365.com/

Paul Bowkett
Microsoft New Zealand
http://microsoft365.com
http://twitter.com/paulbowkett
http://linkedin.com/in/paulbowkett

Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1308414 20-May-2015 12:30

paulb001:
Hi Bryan, sorry once again you have had issues with our 365 service and support, I agree that our support teams could have been more proactive in communicating with you and we want to ensure they are working in a timely manner, however from time to time there will be issues and support simply cannot be across all of the backend services at this granular level (we run literally millions and millions of mailbox's on hundreds of thousands of tenants). Not an excuse but the issue itself impacted a very small number of customers (very few customers use DNS from us or the old plans) and as mentioned last week, we aimed to have this bug fixed by end of last week, which we resolved on Friday US time/Sat APAC time. I understand our support team had a call with you this evening to cover this.

Rest assured that we have a robust process for managing service outages as can be evidenced by our support levels and response in the past, You can view our service levels and uptime history at: http://trustoffice365.com/

Yes I did have a call last night and this fault is now resolved.

An interesting piece of information regarding the service health that I was told is that incidents are not reported unless more than 100 calls per hour are logged. I suggested that the language "a few customers" not be used in the impact statements in future if this is the case but I guess this is just a language issue (Chinese->English).

It was an interesting conversation and I got the impression that the support team really did want to improve so hopefully that occurs. They mentioned that they had seen this conversation as well which is good. I will be sticking with Office 365 as I really like the service so hopefully things go smoothly going forward.

Dynamic

3866 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1308432 20-May-2015 12:44

Klathman: I will be sticking with Office 365 as I really like the service so hopefully things go smoothly going forward.

I completely agree with that statement. However we still manage DNS with a 3rd party, just in case the proverbial hits the fan. Microsoft seem to have learned well from the BPOS outages and our experience with Office 365 is very very good other than the occasional provisioning issue, but I still like to have the Plan B.

TBH we put the 'easy' clients with Office 365 and have migrated a number of clients to Office 365 from other Hosted Exchange providers as the price is pretty good. (I have heard grumbling from other providers that Microsoft are using their deep pockets to 'buy' the market.) We have a couple of clients with more interesting requirements and we have these with another Hosted Exchange provider (Intermedia) who we know (based on experience) that we can get top-shelf support from at short notice.

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paulb001

40 posts

Geek

Trusted

#1308457 20-May-2015 13:29

Klathman:
paulb001:
Hi Bryan, sorry once again you have had issues with our 365 service and support, I agree that our support teams could have been more proactive in communicating with you and we want to ensure they are working in a timely manner, however from time to time there will be issues and support simply cannot be across all of the backend services at this granular level (we run literally millions and millions of mailbox's on hundreds of thousands of tenants). Not an excuse but the issue itself impacted a very small number of customers (very few customers use DNS from us or the old plans) and as mentioned last week, we aimed to have this bug fixed by end of last week, which we resolved on Friday US time/Sat APAC time. I understand our support team had a call with you this evening to cover this.

Rest assured that we have a robust process for managing service outages as can be evidenced by our support levels and response in the past, You can view our service levels and uptime history at: http://trustoffice365.com/

Yes I did have a call last night and this fault is now resolved.

An interesting piece of information regarding the service health that I was told is that incidents are not reported unless more than 100 calls per hour are logged. I suggested that the language "a few customers" not be used in the impact statements in future if this is the case but I guess this is just a language issue (Chinese->English).

It was an interesting conversation and I got the impression that the support team really did want to improve so hopefully that occurs. They mentioned that they had seen this conversation as well which is good. I will be sticking with Office 365 as I really like the service so hopefully things go smoothly going forward.

To clarify the Service Health dashboard is trigged by a bunch of things including our automated operations management systems, not specifically customer calls, although this is also a trigger if for some reason there is an issue that doesn't get picked up but our monitoring services, this can happen sometimes given the complex and comprehensive nature of the service. we also manually update the SHD [and specific customers SHD] based on a variety of factors. You can read more about our support and SLA processes at: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-service-health.aspx

Paul Bowkett
Microsoft New Zealand
http://microsoft365.com
http://twitter.com/paulbowkett
http://linkedin.com/in/paulbowkett

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