Microsoft Support Incident

Well, say what you will about Microsoft, but I am currently dealing with them on an issue and have found their support to be prompt, courteous and helpful.

Here's the scenario...User running Office 2003 on a Dell Latitude D800 with Windows XP Pro. Outlook 2003 is crashing often. 20 times today according to the user.

User has a rule to move any emails larger than 256kb to the large messages folder. This is a server side rule.

User is connecting to Exchange Server 5.5 SP4 running on an NT 4.0 SP6a box with Norton AV for Exchange.

Looked on Microsoft's website and found article 834466 that lists symptoms very similar to that above.

Basically, the problem might be caused when the server isn't properly converting messages with ASCII text to Unicode.

Anyhow, called up Microsoft support to get the hotfix (ok so it's a little annoying that they make you call for the fix, but I guess they want to make sure that you need it), get an answer right away and 10 minutes later I have the fix. Looks like they have plenty of support staff to handle calls, which is nice. Most companies don't.

For example, Dell's support isn't what it used to be. Now you get put in a long wait queue even if you purchased enterprise hardware such as servers or tape libraries...that is unless you buy their "gold" support which I find to be ridiculously expensive.

Now I just need to wait until the morning after the nightly backups are done in order to install the patch. Then we get to see if the patch fixes the user's problem.

The problem can also occur with similar users connecting to Exchange 2000.

Comments

[Ryan]

Dell's support out and out sucks unless you have paid for Gold level or higher. Microsoft support has been decent.

[Alex Scoble]

Didn't used to be that way though. A few years ago if you called for server assistance you got help right away and it was from a higher tiered support person too.

...And the world moves on.

Can't complain about the price though.

[Joe]

PSS for Exchange has really gone down hill, to the point where it is barely worth calling anymore. It used to be great, but I have experienced incredible delays as of late, and really clueless techs....