mkhan
Posts: 3
Joined: 18.Jan.2008
Status: offline
|
The story you about to read is 100% accurate. I have not embellished it at all. This is exactly the way it happened...
At my work they decided they would start sending out an newsletter via email. To be nicely formatted, they chose to send the newsletter email out in HTML format, the same formatting that web sites use. Because the newsletter could be a little long, they created a "table of contents" at the top. If you clicked one of the topics at the top of the newsletter it would jump down to the chosen section. Then at the bottom of the section, there would be a link "Return to Top", that would take you back to the top if you clicked it. I'm sure if you've spent any amount of time on the web, you've seen pages like this. Not only does it make a web page easier to navigate, it's perfect for something like an email newsletter.
They finished the design and formatting, created a "test" newsletter to send to a few people, just to make sure it worked OK, before sending it to 2000 people world-wide. The testing went really well. The newsletter could be read by Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, just about every mail program we could think of.
Then we tried in a Microsoft product Outlook Web Access (OWA for short).
This is a "web" version of Outlook, so that if you are traveling, you can use any computer anywhere in the world, go to our special OWA website and access your Outlook inside a browser. We've used OWA for years and it's proven to be very popular and convenient.
So we open the newsletter in OWA and looked great. We click on one of the items in the "table of contents". Instead of jumping down the page to proper section, it opened a new browser with the same contents as the original browser window. If you clicked any item in the "table of contents" the same thing happened. Outlook worked just fine, but clearly there was something wrong with OWA, but what?
We tried formatting the newsletter differently, we searched the Internet for answers, we had 4 people working on this for 2 full days, with no solution. So, what to do?
Microsoft has a "per incident" technical support program. You call an 800 number, pay $300 with your credit card and they will fix your problem, guaranteed. We decided we had wasted enough time and that it would be worth the $300.
We called the 800 number and an Indian sounding woman answered. She asked us for our names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and of course, our credit card number. This took about 20 minutes. She then told us, please stay on the line and she would connect us to technical support.
After a few minutes on hold, she came back on the line and said she had a technical support person on the line with her and was "handing us over"
to him. The technical support person also sounded Indian and began to ask us for some information. Our names, our addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and last, and certainly most importantly, what problem were we having. We explained the problem we were having with our newsletter in great detail. That it worked in all mail programs except OWA. He said he understood and told us, please stay on the line and he would connect us to the department responsible for OWA support.
After a few minutes on hold, he came back on the line and said he had a OWA technical support person on the line with him and was "handing us over" to him. The OWA technical support person also sounded Indian and began to ask us for some information. He wasn't too interested in our names and addresses and went right to the technical problem we were having with OWA. We explained the problem we were having in great detail. We told him the problem would be easy to work on and suggested that we send him the test newsletter email. That way, he could look at it in Outlook and OWA at the technical support center, and would have all the resources he needed to find the problem. We sent him them email, he received it, but then for some reason, he didn't like the idea of working on it on his own system, maybe it would have been too easy and he wanted a challenge. He didn't elaborate.
Instead, he told us he wanted us to join a "Live Desktop Session". We went to a Microsoft website and typed in a special code. The screen flickered a little bit, then a little box appeared in the lower right corner, say "desktop shared". At this point, he could see our desktop, as if he was standing behind us. He asked us to show him the problem. First we opened the newsletter email in Outlook and it worked correctly. We opened the newsletter email in OWA and it was broken. We then spent about 45 minutes checking different settings, but nothing could get it to work.
At this point he wanted us to log into our OWA server. I reminded him that it would be much easier to work on it with his OWA server, since he already had the newsletter email. Again, he avoided the productive approach.
So we logged into our OWA server, still using the "Live Desktop".
We checked 30-40 different settings over a period of 2 hours. The pattern was something like: check 1 to 3 settings, then he'd put us on hold for about 5 minutes. Then he'd come back on the line and we'd go through the process again. After 2 hours, he told us that it was a "difficult"
problem and that he would need to "escalate" the problem to a higher level of technical support. Instead of connecting us, he told us that someone would call us back the next day.
The next day, we got a call from Microsoft support, this time the voice was definitely American, a guy with a slight Texan twang. He told us that he had received the problem report, researched it and had a resolution. Finally, we had found someone who knew what they were doing
*and* they had a solution!
He explained to us that what we were experiencing was a "feature" not a "bug". He had contacted the OWA software developers and they told him that viewing a "table of contents" in OWA would be a "security" problem, due to the way OWA was designed. There were no plans to fix it, in the current release or any future releases. I asked him why he considered this information to be a "resolution" and he told me, "OWA is working as designed".
So, 3 or 4 of our people working on this problem over 3 or 4 day period, we had wasted around 100 person hours on a "feature". We were all really bummed out by all of this, but if there was any consolation, at least the support call was "guaranteed".
When I asked the support guy about the "guarantee", he explained, if we would have found a "bug", they would work on a "fix" for it and there would be no charge. However, it wasn't a "bug", it was a "feature".
The fact that we found an undocumented "feature" was not covered by the "guarantee".
So that's how the story ends. We spent 100 worthless hours and $300 to find an undocumented feature in a insecure Microsoft product.
I was truly without words.
|
|
My Subscription |
My Forums |
Address Book |
Member List |
Search |
FAQ |
Ticket List |
Log Out
Printable Version
Limited time MSExchange.org offer! -- 1.Sep.2008 1:00:00 PM
Problems with Internal Bookmarks in OWA 2K3 using IE7 - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread