"Tis The Season

I'd like to take a Time Out from technology and see if I can't raise some money for the Salvation Army. Times are tough many this season, but there are some that are in desperate need. The Salvation Army does a lot of great things in our communities. Please help them help others.

"Tis The Season

I'd like to take a brief Time Out from talking about making money to focus on Giving. I want to help the Salvation Army raise some cash. The programs they sponsor in our local communities are outstanding. Business may be tough for us, but life is a lot tougher for others.

OfficeLive Is Up - Finally

Yesterday I actually got a call from an escalation tech. Of course he called the office and got voice mail. Never mind that I told everyone I talked to to make sure the cell number was primary. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. He was telling me that the escalation folks had determined my problem was complicated enough to be referred to product development. Only they were doing a softeare update (in the middle of the day?) and so it wouldn't go through until the afternoon.

I called my speed dial buddies for an update again at the end of the day. Much to my surprise I was told access had been restored (no mention of the cause of the problem). He also said that everyone had been talking about the Vista/IE lockup problem. Seems the OfficeLive code doesn't play well with Google Analytics. Never mind that it seems to work on pretty much any other site and with every other browser and OS except for Vista and IE. But it was my problem, not theirs. Once I removed the tracking code from all the pages everything seems to work. Supposedly there are work-arounds out there somewhere. Time to start digging.

Total down time: five days

Wednesday Update

I called for my mid-day update. Seems whatever Carrie did last night is now undone. I was unable to log in again. Locked out of everything. I was told the escalation team has been in my file a lot, but no updates.

I still need to find out why most of my entries have three or more instances and how I'm going to resolve that.

OfficeLive - The Saga Continues

Well, I talked to someone today (and she actually admitted that she COULD talk to the escalation team) who tried yet again to reset my password. Ooops. It didn.t work. Again. But it did reset the 24-hour clock. So now I'm locked out for another day. I was basically told "don't touch anything and don't call us, we'll call you.

Later when I want to post to forums and blogs or do anything else that requires my Microsoft Live ID/Passport didn't work. So I hit speed dial and got Carrie. Sweet Christmas! She actaully got me logged in! Best of all, she admitted to me that a person from the escalation department was there and said she was going to march over there and see if he could expedite my case.

I'm afraid it may cost the poor girl her job, but if so she can come to work for me anytime. I think she actually gets it!

I still can't get to my Web site designer, and my site still doen't come up for m ost visitors, but at least now I can look at all my contacts. Almost all of which are now in triplicate. Some are entered five times or more. *sigh* Here's another long process I'll probably have to pay someone to handle.

And we'll see if I can still access my site by down's early light.

Sanity Check

I'm looking for some validation here before I go too far down the path of anger and frustration. Please read the next few paragraphs - just a couple of minutes of your time. Or just the paragraph in red if you're really in a hurry. If you think I'm blowing things out of proportion then shoot me an email, post your thoughts here or just close this page. If you think I'm on target, please email anyone you think can help, whether it's advice or someone working at Microsoft. We can prove the "six degrees of separation" theory again and maybe spare some other sap from the frustration I'm experiencing.

Short story: I've Been working for the last three weeks or so to build a new Web site with Microsoft's OfficeLive. I even wrote a glowing article in the Snohomish County Business Journal about this great product. Come Friday evening all the magic stuff to transfer byteslaves.com to the OfficeLive (OL) servers had been done. The pages were all tested and - except for some content - we were ready to go.

Saturday morning problems showed up on the OL side. I contacted support and a helpful agent found some "behind the scenes" problems. More of this Saturday evening and another call to support and more behind the scenes work. I called it a night with plans to finish Sunday. Logged into the control center but could not access the Web design feature. "Technical difficulties - try later" said the message. Finally I calledthe supportnumber in my soeed dial. The woman I talked to managed to lock my accounbt by entering the wrong login information too many times. Can't fix that. I'm locked out for 24 hours. With no recourse.

I finally convince her to get a supervisor. Rules is rules he says. Try it again tomorroew night. More discussion and he finally agrees to open a troubel ticket. Twenty-four hours go by, I try again, still no joy. I also find I (and my customers) can't access my site using Vista and IE7. Great. Some even complain about XP. Locks up the browser. I call my speed dial buddies again.
I talk to a guy who tells me 1) he can't help, it's in the other department. 2) I can't talk to anyone in that department. 3) He can't give me a status. 4) There's no one that can give me a status. 4) There's no one I can call or write to with complaints about the service. I have to wait 24 hours. Excuse me? This is "support?"

Today, as I write this, I'm talking to my speed dial buddies. Oops. They goofed again. It's going to be ANOTHER 24 hours before I MIGHT have access. And still no status and no one else I can talk to. No estimate on when my visitors might be able to successfully visit my site.

I want to send a message to these folks that it is NOT OK to provide this kind of service to any customer. I know my problem will get resolved one way or another eventually. But if we don't make ourselves heard, who's going to hold big business accountable? They couldn't care less if I close my account. So tell me what you think I should do. Get your friends to weigh in. Help me rattle some cages.

OfficeLive "Support" - Day 2

Now anyone using Vista and Internet Explorer can't access the site. I call and I get a gentleman I'll call Dave (protecting the ignorant). He's the guy who sent me this email last night after I submitted an online ticket saying that I was upset that I couldn't access my page after their support agent entered my credentials incorrectly and locked me out for 24 hours. Here's what Dave had to say.

Unfortunately, as the previous agent stated, because you've failed to sign-in to the account so many times your account has been locked for 24 hours. In some cases we can unblock this type of restricted access; however, this is not the case with this particular issue. The only thing I can recommend at this point is to wait a full 24 hours before signing into your account. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you Sven, especially just before 'launching' your web site.

For your convenience, our support staff is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please call us at 1-866-591-5483 for immediate support. If you choose to reply via email, please do not change the subject line so that we can directly reference your case.

Oh yeah, when I tried to reply the address line was blank. So tell me how this attitude fosters customer satisfaction and puts forth an air of customer service. As I type this the clocking is click over 24 - the number of hours I was told that must pass. And I still can't log in. I'm worse off than I was before I called yesterday. And the only thing I hear is "I can't help you and there's no one at Microsoft that will." What seems to go unspoken is that it really doesn't seem to matter to anyone there.

I suggested to Dave that perhaps someone should go to customer service training. Here I am writing nice things about them in a major local business journal and they're just blowing me off. Couldn't care less it seems. Hey Dave, if I got a bad burger at McDonald's I bet you theyd give me a new one, and maybe a sundae to go with it. I could surely write to a franchise owner or bigwig at home office. But not so at Microsoft.

Stay tuned. If they make this right I'll post that. But I will also let you know if they don't.

OfficeLive - Not So Hot?

I've been setting up a new site using Microsoft's OfficeLive. Over the last few weeks I've been able to build a site that looks pretty hot. I got everything pretty much ready, then the crapola hit the fan. Suddenly stuff quit working. I couldn't access the Web design portion of the site. Got a message saying there were technical difficulties and to try again later.

I called support several times, and they were very helpful. At first. But they've had to reset my password each time so they could access my account to resolve various problems. Today I went in to finish up the Web site and kept getting an error message saying I couldn't access my Web site due to "technical problems." Finally I called support and they, once again, wanted to change the password. Suddenly we find we're locked out. "Too many incorrect logns" they tell me. Huh? I was logging in just fine to the OfficeLive. I just could not edit my site. The support people tell me I'm locked out for 24 hours. WTF? It was working fine except for that one area. Somehow they screwed the pooch. But they're telling me I can't do anything to my site for 24 hours. No recourse. Some insincere apologies. But they obviously dont give a damn.

This is great reason to stay away from the Big Guys offerings. They look great on the outside, but not so hot hen it comes to delivering service.

Disregard my article about OfficeLive. Shiny on the outside, rotten on the inside. Support is totally unconcered with the end user.