Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Microsoft Fun - Support for support

I maintain Microsoft O365 domains for two different local non-profits.  These are a good deal for non-profits as they get 10 Business Premium and 300 Business Basic licenses for free plus nice discounts on other products.  As such I get to deal with the quirks of a large company.  O365 has a nice option to get support when you have problems.  It has a AI assistant (not useful for the questions I have) and then open up tickets with options for phone or email callbacks (although it seems they always want to use the phone).  The support folks try hard, but are often not able to help much.  A few annoying quirks are:

  • They often want to see you screen and start up a screen sharing session.  They like to do this via teh quick assist app that only runs on windows and mac machines.  If I say I am on a linux machine, they go 'huh', talk with their manager, and, depending on if the manager is experienced or not, will then switch to teams which does run on linux. 
  • Microsoft has multiple support groups for their different products, but links to access these support teams is either in the left side menus (Identity) or scattered around on various screens (Teams) instead of being accessible via the nice ? icon. O365 support cannot transfer tickets to other support groups and, unless you do a lot of poking around menus, you have no idea they even exist. 
So, for example, I have a question about MFA and open a O365 support ticket.  They contact me, start up a quickassist screen sharing session, and walk me through opening up a support ticket with the Identity support group.  Good thing they did as the options they had me pick to open up the ticket had nothing to do with MFA - it was more with dealing with how to create applications.

So now I need support just to access support - way to go Microsoft.  Seems like an immense waste of time and resources.

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