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Why I Think Microsoft Really Does Suck – or Lamentations of a Former MCSE
Well, I resigned myself to the cold hard truth. After many years in a career largely built upon the ability to support Microsoft enterprise systems I have to admit it: Microsoft Sucks.
Here’s why.
I work for a very large nonprofit humanitarian organization. In all fairness, we have received generous gifts from Microsoft in the past. However, we have been involved in a massive project to roll out a company intranet portal for about two years. Large sums of money were invested – primarily on development – and the product was unleashed on the user base (1000 domestically and several thousand overseas) about two months ago.
We built the platform on an infrastructure consisting of a SAN based clustered SQL back end, an application server, and two load balanced front end servers. This has proven to be more than enough horsepower. Most of the overseas users are stuck with very slow VSAT connections and thus the demand on our end to support simultaneous transactions is low.
Soon after we released the product, we began to experience several bizarre issues. The environment is highly customized – it is not an out of the box build by any means. However, the vendor who did the development had every Microsoft blessing a vendor could have.
Among the issues we have experienced are that suddenly new users are unable to access the site. Old users are still able to access it. The permissions, policies, groups, ou’s and every other Active Directory attribute of the new users is identical to the old users.
In addition to this issue, we are unable to modify the existing groups in SharePoint.
The most recent issue involved adding a third front end (WFE in Microsoft parlance) web server to the farm, which we were unable to do. This is the point where we decided to open a $249 ticket with Microsoft to solve the issue. This is the experience I shall discuss.
Our IT Director opened the case which I promptly took over. I was put on the phone with a support ‘engineer’ who was clearly in a country that begins with the letter ‘I’. I assure you that I do not have anything against a person’s ethnicity, country of origin, or anything else – especially when they are trying to help me solve a problem! However, the connection sounded like he was on 1960’s Apollo mission circling the dark side of the Moon, or perhaps calling from the Titanic as it was about to bubble beneath the sea. In addition to the horrid quality of the connection which kept dropping out, his accent was so severe I could barely understand him.
I was on the phone, quite patiently, for 8 1/2 hours that Friday. My overseas friend ran through every wizard, every permission and registry key. When he had scraped the bottom of his barrel of tricks he began taking shots in the dark – none of which proved fruitful. Eventually he was able to make the ‘wizard’ say that the server had been successfully joined to the farm – at which point he tried to say that he met his obligations according to the original scope of the ticket. However, when we tried to browse the site from the new web server we received only errors.
Finally I told him I had to go and we put the case on hold until Monday morning. He was supposed to call at 10AM but did not. I called in and was put through to another ‘engineer’ in the same country. The connection was again so bad and his accent so severe that I refused to repeat the eight and a half hour torture session I had been through on Friday. This resulted in me having to call back and get in the queue two more times until I finally got through on a usable connection with another overseas engineer with a much clearer enunciation of the English language. I spent another five hours on the phone with him which proved fruitless and again reached the point of taking shots in the dark. At this point I really didn’t have much patience left and turned the call back over to my Director. He echoed my sentiments that clearly we weren’t getting anywhere and the case needed to be escalated. It appeared that the issue most likely was coming from a corrupted configuration database and not from the actual install of SharePoint. However, these “enterpise level support” engineers had no idea how to troubleshoot beyond the wizards and graphical tools of IIS and SharePoint Central Management. It seemed fairly obvsious that the troubleshooting would likely have to move into the realm of tracing SQL transactions, looking at database tables, etc – or perhaps even restoring an old backup of the configuration database if that was the culprit. We didn’t want to attempt these things ourselves because we are not SharePoint people. Our department is lean – I manage everything from switching, routing, VMWare and SAN administration to Exchange. Digging into the guts of SharePoint was something we wanted to leave to the ‘experts’.
When my boss explained this to the engineer he told us he was the last line of support and the case could go no further than he. That seemed a bit difficult to believe. I’ve been involved in other such issues that eventually went to the software engineering team responsible for building it. So my friend overseas is the last line of support for one of the largest and richest corporations in the world. Pretty impressive.
Essentially we cut our losses and tried to contact someone else at Microsoft who could direct us on a more fruitful support path. We failed. We were lied to, given attitude, and again told we had no other choice. We have contracted a private SharePoint engineer responsible for some very large corporate projects and hoping he will be able to help.
Tell me how a corporation the size of Microsoft with such a near global ‘monopoly’ in the business world, omnipresent and all powerful, can not provide a decent quality of support? The connections were unusable or barely usable, the engineers were unable to be understood, in some cases they were rude and indignant, and ultimately were unable to solve our issue. Their understanding of the product was limited to a very narrow scope and they clearly did not understand things like clustering, or load balancing. One engineer tried to tell me that all users on a domain by default have permission to log onto a server. Can you imagine?
I can not express how deeply disturbed, angry and disappointed I am. In the mean time I’m cozying up to Linux. I can assure you my next out of the box computer will be a Mac.
This would be a great time to buy Apple…
