Cloud based data management

Microsoft has admitted that its refurbished but hamstrung volume licensing website is still limping along for some customers and partners, who are yet to gain full access to the portal, or worse are logging in and being served the wrong details.

The company told The Register today that it was still struggling to provide some users with access to its Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) months after it relaunched the system.

“While the vast majority of partners and customers are able to access the system, there remain some customers who may experience difficulties and it has taken us longer than expected to correct these issues,” admitted MS senior marketing manager Joanna Sharpe.

“We are taking all necessary steps to resolve the situation and we are working with each impacted customer or partner to restore permissions if they can’t be resolved online.”

Meanwhile, the software vendor told us it was aware of the VLSC data leak cockup that we first reported earlier this week.

Once again the company declined to tell us if the issue was isolated to one customer or if had affected other Microsoft punters too.

However, Sharpe’s statement on the matter seems to suggest that more than one customer had been served up the wrong details when logging into the VLSC site.

“Microsoft is aware of the issue and working with the customer to resolve it. If customers have questions, they should contact their Microsoft account representative or solution provider,” she said.

El Reg has been pestering Microsoft on and off for weeks now, following the less-than-pretty makeover of its online volume licensing estate in December last year.

Today’s statements took the best part of a week to arrive in our inbox. It's fair to say that Microsoft is attempting to succeed at a damage limitation exercise with its series of VLSC blunders.

Sadly for the firm, customers and partners at the licensing coalface see things quite differently. And plenty of them are still grumbling.

“One or two weeks shy of 2 months without being able to access all of my licenses (a month without access to ANY of my licenses). Hours spent on the phone being bounced between departments, emails ignored and general unhelpness. No-one wanting to take ownership of issues,” griped Scott Campbell in a thread earlier this month that was posted on a Novell forum.

“You'd think with the complete mess that Microsoft made of the migration that they would at least verify that {old system license count} == {new system license count}, but no.

"You'd think that the people at the MVLSC would be able to look at the old system to verify that hey, the 20 or so agreements you previously had didn't actually migrate and wow, yeah, you should have them.

“And why on earth is the MS Licensing center down so frequently, even before they migrated I would frequently hit them during 'scheduled' maintenance... <mutter> <mutter> <mutter>...”

Meanwhile, Reg reader Simon, who told us about the VLSC customer data leak earlier this week, confirmed today that Microsoft had indeed been in contact with him about the security boo boo.

Progress there is also slow, however.

"They [Microsoft] have been in contact this morning. We have tried a few things but I am currently without access to the site. At least I don’t have access to things I shouldn’t do. I had to send some details off to them as the registration didn’t seem to work correctly yet," he told us. ®

Cloud based data management