Microsoft BPOS cloud outage burns Exchange converts
'All in' now looking for a 'way out'
Microsoft has served up another apology for the unreliability of its cloud after burning converts to its BPOS collaboration service by killing their email.
Dave Thompson, corporate vice president for Microsoft's online services, has been telling customers who've gone "all in" on Microsoft's BPOS cloud that he's really "sorry for the inconvenience" that they've suffered.
Customers on BPOS in the US and worldwide were kicked off their hosted Exchange email systems, being unable to read, write, or access their messages. All users were affected – from down in the cubicle farm all the way up to the CEO's corner office. The outages started Tuesday and came after weeks of the service slowly degrading.
The cause of the problem, Thomson said, was "malformed email traffic" in BPOS's Exchange Servers – and, no, he wasn't more specific than that. He also included some hocus-pocus about "obscure cases" and "related issues."
Thompson further groveled on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
I'd like to apologize to you, our customers and partners, for the obvious inconveniences these issues caused. We know that email is a critical part of your business communication, and my team and I fully recognize our responsibility as your partner and service provider. We will provide a full post mortem, and will also provide additional updates on how our service level agreement (SLA) was impacted. We will be proactively issuing a service credit to our impacted customers.
He also stated that Microsoft genuinely values its BPOS customers' business, knows it must try harder, and added – for good measure – that Redmond could have been done a lot more to keep people in the loop.
Thompson is right to prostrate himself in front of his customers: those who were burned include brand-new BPOS converts who've moved off other webmail systems or old Exchange servers they ran themselves. Admins who made the case inside their companies for jumping on BPOS now find themselves having a lot of explaining to do to their bosses, or are actively looking for a way off Microsoft's cloud. Or both.
You can take a sampling of the frustration and disappointment on the Microsoft Online Services TechCenter forum, where one user called DarkOneX_Work, who is moving 1,100 webmail users to BPOS, wrote: "This is looking really bad, we just purchased this solution at the end of the year and started migrating our many users over. ... We simply cannot have things like this happening hardly ever, let along multiple times per month this is outragous! [sic] Fix this MS!"
Another posting newbie, RichSaenz, has been left to feel stupid by Microsoft: "I've been with Microsoftonline [sic] for two weeks now, two outages in that time and the boss looks at me like I'm a dolt. I was THIS close to signing with Intermedia."
Kevin Baker posted that he had migrated his company to Exchange Online from in-house Exchange 2003 last October. Now he's wishing he hadn't. "I'm sorry to say that I regret everything I ever said about how this would be better. It has been far worse in terms of both performance and reliability. I hate to be so harsh, but I am deeply frustrated," he wrote.
"Email is the one thing that everyone from the guys in the factory up the CEO uses," he continued. "The c-suite execs hardly use anything BUT email. It has a bigger impact on IT's reputation with end-users and business leaders than anything else, and these constant service outages and 'impairments' have got all of us in IT panicked. We're actively looking at migration paths back to in-house email."
Baker added: "My baseline expectation was that this service would be at least AS functional as, say, Hotmail or some other free email service. Needless to say, I have been bitterly disappointed."
Microsoft has been gung-ho in pushing BPOS and Office 365 – which it's becoming – as the alternative to Google Apps. There's a market and mindshare war underway between Redmond and Mountain View, with Microsoft paying partners to rip out Gmail inboxes for BPOS while bragging about its cloud wins.
In this war there's no room for prisoners or mistakes because it's not just bad PR, it's bad for business. Microsoft's customers are still new enough to be able to walk away. Microsoft's only consolation is that it is not the only online service provider who's getting tripped up by the basics of managing lots of those overworked computers known as servers – Google's Blogger and Amazon's AWS have had their own problems recently, as well.®
COMMENTS
Horribly Immature
I participated in a 2200 seat groupwise to exchange online migration, starting last August and finishing up in January. The largest impediment to the migration was the unreliability of the service and the complete lack of communication within the organization itself. I would often be on the phone with level 1 support in excess of an hour troubleshooting connectivity issues before they would check with their peers and realize a larger outage was in progress. The hosted blackberry service is complete crap as well.
Whomever came up with the acronym BPOS must have been giggling inside, because it truly is a BIG PIECE OF SHI# !!
Once a convert, always a convert ...
I can't believe the gist of this story. The Microsofties that I met, and the Microsofties that we have in our organisation, will defend the Beast From Redmond until their death.
When things go wrong in the colourful world of MS, and a new OS needs to be bought, these are the people who were happily shelling out the license fees for W2K, once their expenditure for ME was found to be wasted. They are even grateful and fork out the money with pleasure, thankful that Microsoft is willing to share The Most Advanced Operating System in this world with them. No kidding. And when I point out how Exchange is a dog to administrate, and that e-mail is no rocket science, and what they actually ought to do, is - almost nothing, because a mail server is supposed to 'just work', they'll tell me how thankful they are not to have to touch that dreadful *nix-command-line [I cite].
And this rambling could go on and on. No, I don't believe the message. I rather read the postings as trying to appeal to the Big Brother not to hit one with 50 strokes of the cane, but rather with 10 only. "Be kind to me, pleeeezzze, and make my boss and my users happy. I luv u, I luv u, I luv u!"
"Nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft" still holds water. Unfortunately. I can kind of understand the mindset of my colleagues sitting on MS products. You suffer like hell, but you have a secure job. No need to learn anything new. Qualification comes from a boot-camp.
It is overall not too convenient, but also not too bad. The bit of maso is hidden in most of us, and if you can bring it out, it feeds the family.
</sarcasm>
Strictly correct.
As a long-time sysadmin myself, I once confronted a colleague working for an IT consultancy firm as to why he kept pushing MS products. His answer was, "that way, we get follow-up work by the boatload. If we'd push Linux or UNIX, we'd install, then never hear from the customer again."
Go figure.
Tell me about it...
"Nobody has ever been fired for buying Microsoft" still holds water.
We lost a couple of support contracts recently because I slated certain Microsoft products the client was intent-on buying as being unsuitable for their purpose. I hadn't appreciated that IT is a religion not a science, and that I had committed blasphemy in doing this.
Both of these sites then called-in a competing IT contractor who transferred them from an inhouse SMTP/IMAP mailserver onto hosted Exchange.
A member of staff confided that even before these latest events, one site has already had a five-day email outage which caused massive disruption. They (naturally) don't know how much business was lost as a result, but the money would probably have paid for traditional inhouse mailservers and support for a very long while.
admins vs management
I'm guessing it wasn't the "admins" who convinced the company to move to a Microsoft cloud, but some management folks with only a vague grasp of IT and a vaguer grasp of accounting, but a lot of pull inside the company and even more susceptibility to Microsoft salespeople talk.
They will, of course, put all the BLAME on the admins, as usual, but let's be accurate here.
