We've been here before: MS tweaks volume licensing site again
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Microsoft will once again overhaul its error-prone volume licensing website in November, following months of glitches with the portal since Redmond relaunched it late last year.
The company’s global partner boss Eric Ligman confirmed in a blog post today that Microsoft would tweak the service, after customers continued to complain about problems that have dogged the site.
“We have reached out to many partners and customers around the world through Live Meetings, interviews, hands-on usability studies, forums, and events to gather input and feedback on how to improve the VLSC [Volume Licensing Service Center],” Ligman said.
He then went on to somberly note that: “We take this feedback seriously and are continually incorporating suggestions into the VLSC.”
The latest round of major updates – there have been several since the relaunch in December 2009 – are set for November.
Nearly a year on since the less-than-pretty overhaul, Microsoft will be hoping to draw a line under the whole sorry affair.
Ligman said the firm would add offline access to VLSC licensing and relationship summaries, improve the Add Open License functionality, and give customers the power to deny reseller access to their information via an email notification option.
“We will be communicated [sic] more details and providing training materials in October,” he said.
In December Microsoft's volume licensing websites were yanked offline for over a week while the software giant tweaked its service in a move to "improve the licensing management experience" for the firm's users.
Come January this year Microsoft had no choice but to apologise to its partners and customers who struggled to gain access to the VLSC site, or worse, were served up with the wrong login details. ®
COMMENTS
It's not just the site, Microsoft...
Your whole damned volume licensing program is broken. Why not take it all back to the drawing board and come up with one that doesn't suck, doesn't penalise people who purchase legitimate software, takes into account things like the regular use of Ghost, Virtual Machines, spare hardware and other similar normal elements of a modern IT environment whilst not asking for the souls of virgins every year in exchange.
Oh, and if you made the whole VLK program less stupidly complicated, you wouldn't need a great big and complicated bloody website. Greedy gits…
Unbelieveable...
I just can't believe three things about this whole sorry affair:
1) How can Microsoft not be bleeding customers, when they make it so difficult to get licenses? I mean, what other company could have a commerce site that fails constantly and not lose lots of customers over it?
2) Why didn't they revert to the old site if the new one was broken?
3) How could they have not fixed this by now, and in fact not be planning to work on it until November, almost a year after they rolled out the broken site?
Oh, and of course there's 4) How does Microsoft expect people to look to them for software to run important sites, when Microsoft cannot run what should be their most important site?
It's amazing
how useful Access databases are, aren't they.
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