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Topic: IT Employment

Microsoft BPOS uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

Summary: Microsoft customers are pitching media outlets, threatening a Twitter revolt and beginning to ponder alternatives over uptime. All they want is a little customer service attention.

Larry Dignan

By for Between the Lines |

Microsoft customers are pitching media outlets, threatening a Twitter revolt and beginning to ponder alternatives over uptime.

This Microsoft forum highlights the issues with BPOS mail flow in North America. The issue started on May 10 and now has been going on for 2 days. BPOS is a Microsoft-hosted bundle of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online and Live Meeting. There are dedicated, shared (multi-tenant) and government versions of the suite. It's a precursor to Office 365.

The problems appear to be intermittent, but are more than enough to irk customers, who are being vocal about the need for transparency and a dashboard of network health. Microsoft has had its outage issues and Mary Jo Foley has chronicled them repeatedly. Microsoft noted that the problems were with BPOS not Office 365.

A few comments worth sampling.

  • This is the 3rd straight day of issues and we've had intermittent problems since we got on board back in January. Sick and tired of it. I'll be looking for another solution. Microsoft can't even run their own email application!
  • Third time in 48 hours in Ohio. Tuesday PM, overnight/this morning(from around midnight to 8am) and now. Absolutely ridiculous
  • This needs to stop now, degraded and down service basically all week is not what we are paying fo.r The tech support on the line is not giving proper explanation as to what the issue is. Having a support rep at MS tell me it went from orange to red and back again is disrepectful and has me seriously questioning why we should continue using this service. How about a real explanation and a real fix ?
  • noticed that you didn't add a happy face. No happy faces here, either. Back to in-house servers we go, I suppose. This string of incidents will set the cloud/offsite model back months, if not years, i fear.. This may be good for us on the ground, but bad for the hosted model forward momentum.
  • I am blown away at the lack of coverage in the searches, media, blogs, etc. Google BPOS down and you get nothing current! We need to get the word out, i agree.

Consider the word out now. Hopefully these customers can get some attention now.

Topics: IT Employment, CXO, Collaboration, Health, Legal, Microsoft

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23 comments
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  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    We are 2 weeks out of co-existence. I hope this is fluke and addressed soon, openly and permanently.
    cdmann
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    Welcome to "The Cloud". Get used to it because things aren't going to get any better.
    Bob_DaBoob
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    Makes me want to switch the cloud every time I hear these type stories. I see now why there is so much hype. No one is accountable "in the cloud".
    simpleone71
    Reply Vote

    • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

      @simpleone71 actually that isn't true and Microsoft has a financially backed SLA so if it goes down they pay cash back for the downtime. Regardless - are you telling me your Exchange servers replaced in the cloud has better uptime than Microsoft with more capability (25GB in storage for instance for mailbox?) Can you claim your service is as secure? For goodness sake like 25 people work at a datacenter... their head to cost ratio far exceed anything a normal business could put together.

      Downtime and slowdowns will happen...
      jessiethe3rd
      Reply Vote

      • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

        @jessiethe3rd <br>Amazon had a SLA also, but the way it was worded, even though there was a major outage, it wasn't covered by the SLA. A huge issue with these cloud providers is that at the time there is a problem you can't get a straight answer out of them. And yes, my in-house Exchange server is as secure as Microsoft and their patches make it. Their best practices has been followed. And I've only had around 3 business hours downtime in 6 years.
        simpleone71
        Reply Vote

      • our legacy system had much better uptime

        @jessiethe3rd
        We have had two days of complete downtime this week, an another day limping along. Our legacy system never had that much downtime. Heck I used to complain if mail was an hour or two late being delivered.
        sandypants
        Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    I have been using Microsoft BPOS for several years (we were early adopters), and while there have been some hiccups every now and then (with this latest being the most severe), I still am very pleased with the service. Especially when I compare it to the headache of having to manage in house servers for Exchange, SharePoint and OCS and Live Meeting. I am also very pleased with Tech Support. I agree that there needs to be some more proactive transparency with these issues, and that the MOS "Health Status" feature is inadequate. To Microsoft's credit, if you experience a problem and call MOS tech support, they will tell you right away whether or not a problem appears to be widespread or something just with your domain and/or certain users. <br><br>I predict that MOS will learn from this experience in a positive way. Not only will they mitigate the factors that have caused these issues, they will go to further lengths to maintain and enhance customer service and accountability.
    YellaJacket
    Reply Vote

    • The clients I have who were early adopters

      @YellaJacket

      Are fairly forgiving of this week. The service has been very good for the last couple years. Unfortunately I just completed a migration for a client over this last weekend so this is their first experience with the service. Let's just say they are less than pleased and I may lose a long time client over it.
      LiquidLearner
      Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    I have to echo Yellajackets experiences. We have had challenges since we moved in the last 18 months.

    My concern is that this type of issue needs to be segregated between the multiple data centers across the US.. The reason we build paired data centers is to avoid this type of service interruption.

    We need to know WHY it happend and WHY it wont be able to happen again.
    jimmycan@...
    Reply Vote

  • Must not be affecting Live@Edu

    Otherwise I would have gotten tons of complaints by now. Been using the Live@Edu services which are being migrated to the Office 365 platform and aside from a few hiccups and scheduled maintenance it has worked like a charm.

    We had Google Docs before that and it was an uptime nightmare which is why we dropped it. I heard it is better now though.
    bobiroc
    Reply Vote

    • we are edu; we have been down

      @bobiroc
      For days now. and no clear word from Microsoft. At least when this was in house, we could hold someone accountable.
      Perhaps it is geographical.
      sandypants
      Reply Vote

    • We also have part of our org on google mail and it has been fine

      @bobiroc
      I think one downtime for a few hours in about 2 years.
      Microsoft BPOS - 3 downtimes this week, and multiple issues with imap clients, macs, ongoing, etc.
      sandypants
      Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    I wonder if Google hired the same PR firm that was bribing the bloggers to post negative posts about MS. Almost everything you read about MS is negative.
    sharkboyjohn
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    The decision to move to BPOS was taken before my current employer hired me so I didn't have a say in the decision, but I didn't think it was a good idea at the time.
    We finished migrating last Fall.
    And as I expected... things have been average at best... horrible a lot of times ever since.

    I'd been running my own mail servers on a competing product for over 6 years without any serious problems...ever. I rebooted the servers about once a year. Now, problems, delays, black-holed messages, formatting issues, bad support, no logs...NOTHING.

    After this past week, my boss has finally opened the door to moving back... and you BET I'm going to jump at the opportunity to move away from their crappy product as soon as possible....

    To the cloud!... yeah... talked with an Amazon client lately?
    beaner1111@...
    Reply Vote

    • same story here

      @beaner1111@...
      sandypants
      Reply Vote

  • No problems here

    I know Microsoft doesn't have a datacenter in Canada (that I know of), but I haven't had any problems with my accounts within the last week, nor prior for that matter.
    Joe_Raby
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    Intermedia.net. they can migrate you off BPOS, and have Exchange 2010 with 99.999% uptime.
    jabbapage
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft BPOS, Office 365 uptime sparking customer angst, pleas for help

    I moved our organization to BPOS this year for its reliability and disaster recovery potential. Being based in South Florida and all that that means for DR needs, it was more cost effective to leverage BPOS's inherent DR and add EHA than to stand up a new circuit pair and Exchange farm in one of our branch offices in another part of the country. Not being able to rely on the 99.9% SLA makes me worry now about being able to rely on EHA, and has me thinking about standing up my own retention solution for DR purposes, and if I go that route WHAT WAS THE POINT in leaving my on-premise solution? #fixbpos
    wbarton
    Reply Vote

  • Maybe its a Bunch of Googlers telling lies

    We don't have a clue who those users are. Google could have easily planted some of its employees using some of their 20% free time to cause mischief. With Microsoft discovering the lies about FISMA and Google, anything is possible.
    Mr. Dee
    Reply Vote

  • University with 8k accounts

    Completely down over 10 hours yesterday (during business hours) very slow, and unusable all day today.

    Google hiccups for an hour and the press is all over it.
    You know what people are saying the acronym BPOS means now :) ?
    sandypants
    Reply Vote
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