Microsoft Apologizes for BPOS Outages

As a conclusion following a series of Microsoft BPOS outages over the past several weeks, on September 8th, Microsoft issued a statement on Microsoft Online Services Team Blog apologizing for recent outages that affected customers that use Microsoft hosted services such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. By issuing a timely apology to its customers, Microsoft shows that they are serious about making BPOS a success while understanding that service reliability is key for any business that hosted services providers.

My name is Morgan Cole, and I lead a team at Microsoft whose mission is to make sure that BPOS customers have a great experience with our services. We aspire to deliver quality services, and in the last couple of weeks, we have fallen short of this aspiration. During this time, we experienced two network access issues in North America, and just yesterday, two brief periods of service degradation also affecting users served from North America. These incidents were unique to BPOS and not related to other Microsoft services.

I wanted to write here to apologize to you, our customers, for any inconvenience these issues may have caused. We know how important these services are to the daily operation of your business, and we take our responsibility as your partner and service provider very seriously.

I also want to provide a bit more detail about the recent issues.

Specific to the August 23 event: our proactive efforts to upgrade to next generation network infrastructure caused unforeseen problems that affected access to some services. Operations and Engineering quickly identified a design issue in the upgrade that caused unexpected impact, but the issue resulted in a 2-hour period of intermittent access for BPOS organizations served from North America.

The August 23 event was remediated, but the solution did not resolve another underlying issue which created subsequent problems on September 3rd and 7th. BPOS customers experienced brief periods of service degradation, primarily affecting the sign-in service and administrative portals. The impact during the afternoon of September 7th had more widespread customer impact, although the duration was relatively short. We performed emergency maintenance to isolate suspect traffic, which has proven successful in stabilizing the service. We continue to monitor the network and all services to ensure stable operations. Needless to say we, like you, find the events unacceptable and have 24/7 efforts underway to ensure we do not have a repeat of these events.

We appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business – and that’s not acceptable. I can assure you that we are investing the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your – and our own – expectations for a quality service experience every day.

As always, if you are experiencing any service issues, we encourage customers to contact us. Our customer support is available 24 hours a day by telephone or via Service Requests submitted from the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center.

Microsoft Compares BPOS to Google Apps

As SaaS space heats-up, both Microsoft and Google are not wasting their time and put a ton of effort on developing additional features for their respective hosted offerings – Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps.

In a blog post by Barb Mosher of CMS Wire, she speaks about increasing competition between Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps offerings. In January of 2010, Microsoft went as far as develop their own version of hosted services comparison named “Fact-Based Comparison of Hosted Services”, comparing Google Apps with Microsoft BPOS.

I wanted to take this opportunity to remind our dear readers that we still offer complimentary copies of our own feature-for-feature comparative analysis document. You can request your copy by contacting us.

Having reviewed Microsoft’s hosted services comparison document, we noticed that some statements made by Microsoft where inaccurate. I have started a discussion by commending on the original post that grow into a dialog with Andrew Kisslo, Sr. Product Manager at Microsoft.

For additional information, visit the original post, and scroll down for comments.

Until next time,

Steve E. Driz