Poor issue management with Office 365

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Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#173166 13-May-2015 17:37

I always thought that Office 365 would have reasonable customer service in comparison to Google but at the moment this impression is being put to the test.

I noticed recently that federation wasn't working with my Office 365 account so I ran through the remote connectivity analyzer and found that the SRV records weren't being published for the domain.

Odd since Office 365 is the authoritive name servers and these records are automagically created according to the Office 365 portal.

So I log a call expecting that this will be a simple issue and it will all be sorted in no time.

How wrong I was.

I'm now approaching 2 weeks of the call being open and the call has been escalated but even the escalation point will not give me any information other than that they accept that the problem exists. I was even sent a scope of problem document which seemed to be so broad that they could close the call immediately. I replied to this stating what I believed the scope should be but still haven't had any response to this change of scope.

I've asked for call backs and none have been received. I've asked to talk to a manager. Nada. At the moment Vodafone's customer service is looking more responsive.

My big fear now is if a simple DNS change is this hard then how bad will it be if I have a real major issue. Will my business suddenly be crippled by Office 365 support?

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#1304699 13-May-2015 17:40

I'll be watching this thread with interest.

So far the couple of dozen sites we have running Office365 for email etc we are managing the DNS externally. Primarily so if the it hits the fan we can change the records easily to divert services elsewhere.

I have been pretty impressed with the reliability so far (the last 2.5 years) and issues we see are only occasional provisioning issues.

Other than OneDrive for Business having a crap file sync engine that breaks at the drop of a hat of course.

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ajobbins

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#1304720 13-May-2015 18:44

I've been using it for a while. I find the end service itself pretty stable, but the back end is just a cluster. Often have issues creating users or doing certain admin functions. I am an Office 365 partner and at one stage my partner link just broke and I couldn't partner with any new clients. After about 6 weeks of 'escalating' and getting nowhere, I just ended up creating a new account, migrating all my data and setting up partner links again. It was a joke.

In contrast, I have been using Google Apps since 2008 and have never once had an issue I've needed to contact Google about.

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paulb001

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#1304732 13-May-2015 19:22

Hi Klathman, I look after our public cloud services for our SMB market segment and partner community at Microsoft NZ. I'm sorry you have had issues with Office 365 and DNS. We don't normally manage DNS and as you’re probably aware some Domain hosts don’t support SRV records. SRV controls Skype For Business presence in OWA, External federation connectivity and Skype connectivity.

However it sounds like you maybe have our old Small Biz plan where we did manage the DNS. Please can you send me an email with issue details and your SR# to nzcloud@microsoft.com - I will have this reviewed tonight and revert back to you asap.

For those interested, more info on DNS setup for 365 is at: https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Create-DNS-records-at-any-DNS-hosting-provider-for-Office-365-7b7b075d-79f9-4e37-8a9e-fb60c1d95166 For all Microsoft commercial online services customers (Office 365, Azure, CRM Online, Intune and EMS) we value your feedback and we welcome the opportunity on improving our services and support. If you are experiencing any service issues, please always log them with our support team first via the portal – details on how to do this are at http://aka.ms/365support - If you aren’t getting any response, or need to speak with us locally, you can reach myself and my team via nzcloud@microsoft.com

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

richms

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#1304734 13-May-2015 19:30

Ive set a couple of friends up on it for their tiny businesses, just a single mailbox with a few domains and addresses going into it.

all DNS set up externally to microsoft, and the only problem with making the records is one of them has part of the domain name in the server it goes to, which when you have multiple domains in cpanel cant have one domain MX to different servers based on the domain, but despite errors being thrown by the setup process that the record was wrong it all still works ok, so I guess the mx all end up at the same place anyway.

Never had to get in touch with the support, but hope not to based on this.

Richard rich.ms

paulb001

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#1304735 13-May-2015 19:31

Dynamic: I'll be watching this thread with interest.

So far the couple of dozen sites we have running Office365 for email etc we are managing the DNS externally. Primarily so if the it hits the fan we can change the records easily to divert services elsewhere.

I have been pretty impressed with the reliability so far (the last 2.5 years) and issues we see are only occasional provisioning issues.

Other than OneDrive for Business having a crap file sync engine that breaks at the drop of a hat of course.

Hi Mike, we are launching a new sync client shortly with improved and scalable sync, MDM, selective folder sync, and many more features, you can watch the details and demo of this at:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2192

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

paulb001

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#1304737 13-May-2015 19:38

ajobbins: I've been using it for a while. I find the end service itself pretty stable, but the back end is just a cluster. Often have issues creating users or doing certain admin functions. I am an Office 365 partner and at one stage my partner link just broke and I couldn't partner with any new clients. After about 6 weeks of 'escalating' and getting nowhere, I just ended up creating a new account, migrating all my data and setting up partner links again. It was a joke.

In contrast, I have been using Google Apps since 2008 and have never once had an issue I've needed to contact Google about.

Hi Adam, this seems odd, given we have millions of companies running on 365, the user mgmt. is usually very good. I'd like to look into this, can you send me details? and also keen to look into the issues you mention around partner links, was this for a certified Microsoft partner using/accessing internal use rights, or using the Partner admin centre to create trials and manage customers? Feel fee to ping me the details to nzcloud@microsoft.com

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

Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1304833 13-May-2015 21:30

paulb001:
We don't normally manage DNS and as you’re probably aware some Domain hosts don’t support SRV records. SRV controls Skype For Business presence in OWA, External federation connectivity and Skype connectivity. However it sounds like you maybe have our old Small Biz plan where we did manage the DNS. Please can you send me an email with issue details and your SR# to nzcloud@microsoft.com - I will have this reviewed tonight and revert back to you asap.

Hi Paul.

This is on it's way to you now.

The DNS registrar that I use originally didn't support SRV records when I first started to use Office 365, which is exactly why I moved to using the Office 365 DNS service rather than them. I figured that since most of the records were pointing to O365 services anyway, and you updated them if necessary, then this was a good thing too. At that point even my web server was using O365 so this goes back a while now.

Will appreciate any assistance on this one.

Samsung

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paulb001

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#1304986 14-May-2015 10:27

Hi Bryan, thanks for emailing me the details of your case, as noted support had already escalated and engineering were triaging the issue. They are now resolving this and backfilling missing SRV records for a small number of MS managed domains that were affected. Thanks for raising this with us, and your patience and continued support of Office365.

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

Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1305001 14-May-2015 10:49

Just one small question now.

Since it's a known issue that will be impacting federation shouldn't this be listed in the service status somewhere?

I know that I continuously see issues which don't impact me so odd to know that there is an issue, that isn't rectified and is known to impact others, that isn't reported.

EDIT: Just looked at one of the latest notifications and seeing this seems to suggest that this should really be notified. "Customer Impact: A few customers reported that they experienced this issue."

I get the impression that this issue impacts more than a few customers even if they haven't yet realised it.

Dynamic

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#1305013 14-May-2015 11:18

paulb001:
Dynamic: I'll be watching this thread with interest.

So far the couple of dozen sites we have running Office365 for email etc we are managing the DNS externally. Primarily so if the it hits the fan we can change the records easily to divert services elsewhere.

I have been pretty impressed with the reliability so far (the last 2.5 years) and issues we see are only occasional provisioning issues.

Other than OneDrive for Business having a crap file sync engine that breaks at the drop of a hat of course.

Hi Mike, we are launching a new sync client shortly with improved and scalable sync, MDM, selective folder sync, and many more features, you can watch the details and demo of this at:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2192

Thank you Paul. I read about these changes in January and am very much looking forward to seeing them. As an example, we have two 3-4 person law firms using OneDrive for Business and once or twice a quarter we receive a call from them with sync issues.

What I would *really* like is to have the sync status shown in the portal (and perhaps email notifications) so we can see at a glance who has issues, so we are calling them rather than them calling us.

“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” Douglas Adams

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Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1305889 15-May-2015 15:22

I'm actually starting to feel sorry for the escalation engineer now. Just had a call from him which must have been required as he acknowledged up front that he had no more information for me and had no further ETA but just to reconfirm that the problem was being worked on and that there is no ETA.

I raised about no problem being reported in the service health and he thought that there should be but couldn't do anything about that either.

Soooo yeah.

grant_k

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#1305945 15-May-2015 16:23

Dynamic:
paulb001:
Dynamic: I'll be watching this thread with interest.

So far the couple of dozen sites we have running Office365 for email etc we are managing the DNS externally. Primarily so if the it hits the fan we can change the records easily to divert services elsewhere.

I have been pretty impressed with the reliability so far (the last 2.5 years) and issues we see are only occasional provisioning issues.

Other than OneDrive for Business having a crap file sync engine that breaks at the drop of a hat of course.

Hi Mike, we are launching a new sync client shortly with improved and scalable sync, MDM, selective folder sync, and many more features, you can watch the details and demo of this at:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2192

Thank you Paul. I read about these changes in January and am very much looking forward to seeing them. As an example, we have two 3-4 person law firms using OneDrive for Business and once or twice a quarter we receive a call from them with sync issues.

What I would *really* like is to have the sync status shown in the portal (and perhaps email notifications) so we can see at a glance who has issues, so we are calling them rather than them calling us.

I've recently bought a Surface 3 and have had a Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone for a while, both of which support OneDrive, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I created a simple Word Doc on my Surface, which was signed in to OneDrive and expected it to appear on my phone. A OneNote document was already there so it looked like it would be no problem. After a short time, a ! symbol appeared above the OneDrive icon in the taskbar, which when clicked, told me that one file couldn't be synced. It turned out to the the Word Doc I'd just created, so I saved it again and exited Word just in case it was causing a conflict. No, it still wouldn't sync.

Have gone back to Google Drive which I've been using for years and it works without a hitch between all the same devices, including my Windows 7 PC. The interface on my phone is not quite as seamless as OneDrive, which is why I wanted to use it. But based on this experience, I won't bother again unless some major improvements are done.

Klathman

301 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1307705 19-May-2015 11:25

Just another update on this.

Another week on and the case is still open.

No further information about this has been provided to me.

*sigh*

cyberhub

224 posts

Master Geek

#1307718 19-May-2015 11:56

Klathman: I always thought that Office 365 would have reasonable customer service in comparison to Google but at the moment this impression is being put to the test.

I noticed recently that federation wasn't working with my Office 365 account so I ran through the remote connectivity analyzer and found that the SRV records weren't being published for the domain.

Odd since Office 365 is the authoritive name servers and these records are automagically created according to the Office 365 portal.

So I log a call expecting that this will be a simple issue and it will all be sorted in no time.

How wrong I was.

I'm now approaching 2 weeks of the call being open and the call has been escalated but even the escalation point will not give me any information other than that they accept that the problem exists. I was even sent a scope of problem document which seemed to be so broad that they could close the call immediately. I replied to this stating what I believed the scope should be but still haven't had any response to this change of scope.

I've asked for call backs and none have been received. I've asked to talk to a manager. Nada. At the moment Vodafone's customer service is looking more responsive.

My big fear now is if a simple DNS change is this hard then how bad will it be if I have a real major issue. Will my business suddenly be crippled by Office 365 support?

I will also be watching this post closely. At CyberHub we are a webhosting company so we have our own DNS, so everytime we setup a company on Office 365 we always do the DNS which gives us and the end user full control.

Office 365 has come a long way since the BPOS days, back then it was really not a great service but now I have to say that I have not had a single issue with Office 365.

If I was you Klathmman I would setup your own dns for Office 365. You can sign up for a free hosting account update the dns setting for Office 365 and then update the name servers to CyberHub nameservers.

You should have no down time if you do it this way and your SRV issue will come right.

More than happy to help you with this if you need it.

All up it should take 20 - 30 minutes to do all that.

CyberHub - Hosting Made Simple

cyberhub

224 posts

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#1307722 19-May-2015 12:03

I just did a shameless self promo, is that allowed? If not moderators please feel free to edit my post.

CyberHub - Hosting Made Simple

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