The real fun starts if you need to change the email address associated with your Microsoft account.
Six months and multiple support calls later and I'm still receiving Azure billing information and Xbox newsletters at the old address.
Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
151–160 of 182 posts
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I majored in CS. IT is way too confusing.
It's a marketing and ux problem. Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. Groups, teams, etc. why is it Office Groups but Microsoft Teams. Is Microsoft ToDo part of Office? Why is Teams basically Skype/Lynx+Sharepoint but not Office? Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.
> Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products.
I wonder if there's a sort of internal fighting for each team to squat on the "best" names for their product or service. Basically a Dilbertian confusopoly [0] where the goal is to make your project sound like "the obvious choice" regardless of its merits, with "Microsoft" on the front as the only way it stops being impossible to trademark.
I imagine other large companies struggle with this as well, although Amazon seems to have taken to the other extreme [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly [1] https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a marketing and ux problem. Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. Groups, teams, etc. why is it Office Groups but Microsoft Teams. Is Microsoft ToDo part of Office? Why is Teams basically Skype/Lynx+Sharepoint but not Office? Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.
> Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. I wonder if there's a sort of internal fighting for each team to squat on the "best" names for their product or service. Basically a Dilbertian confusopoly [0] where the goal is to make your project sound like "the obvious choice" regardless of its merits, with "Microsoft" on the front as the only way it stops being impossible to trademark. I imagine…
thats exactly whats going on. http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_or...
Branding teams and divisions are getting in the way of coherence and usability. I think ONE of the worst right now is the OneDrive vs SharePoint back and forth. First they were kind of hiding the SharePoint name, and renaming everything onedrive. SharePoint Workspace, formerly Microsoft Office Groove, became OneDrive for Business (because it was the client sync tool, not a server.) Now its making a comeback and certain things are "not" OneDrive, such as 'Office 365' Groups '''SharePoint 'Team Site'' 'Document Libraries''
At least in the Mail world the divide MOSTLY makes sense. Outlook is the Client, Exchange is the server. Yes, the OWA web/javascript client streams from the server and renders in your browser, but otherwise the divide is mostly intact. You NEVER see an Exchange app, and you rarely see the word outside the content of "connect to this server." The SharePoint branding team on the other hand cant handle being the server only and has now forced a SharePoint app that is like some bastardized fork of the OneDrive app. They mostly do the same thing, but not quite. Microsoft needs to draw a line and say "OneDrive = Client, SharePoint = Server" and try and not cross it. The OneDrive web client should be an interface that streams from the SharePoint server to your browser.
I wish they would have left 'Lync' as the "server" to the various clients.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I majored in CS. IT is way too confusing.
It's a marketing and ux problem. Microsoft is terrible at picking good proper nouns for products. Groups, teams, etc. why is it Office Groups but Microsoft Teams. Is Microsoft ToDo part of Office? Why is Teams basically Skype/Lynx+Sharepoint but not Office? Enterprise Architecture teams have their work cut out trying to describe the choices they make.
I'm thinking Microsoft is just terrible at saying NO. Especially NO to certain naming, feature and product requests coming from marketing. It needs more architects with decision power for each product line that curate and focus their efforts.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#155Microsoft truly sucks with account management. Here is what happened to me with Microsoft Office last week: - My Office University account expires. - My father invites me to be part of his Office 365 Family subscription (it includes 5 accounts). - I click on the "Get the invite" button on the email I have received and... "You already have an active account". There was no way from the website to cancel my expired Univ…
I had similiar problem. I called them, got to the real person, who fixed issue within 2 minutes. Total call time was about 5 minutes. That included time, I was searching for invite and so on.
So basically you can be lucky - or not.
IIRC my boss wasted a few hours on the phone with two MS employees - spread over a week or two because their accounting and customer service teams couldn't speak together it seems.
I however was lucky, some tool I had bought was missing from my Windows Store account, after contacting them they contacted me back and I had it fixed within 20 minutes or something.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#156Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.
We built a true Slack alternative - Microsoft Teams ( https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat... ). Ironically that doesn't help the fragmentation argument...
Teams seems to get (relatively) decent reviews in the Android app store, sadly it's not available in our corporate software portal. I do have Sway installed though (tbh I think Sway can be nice just never saw anyone use it)... maybe I can suggest some alterations to the offering. (Edit: Never mind, I was able to login to teams.microsoft.com using my corporate account and instal everything from there. Thanx for the pointer.)
Strange thing is that indeed, the "save conversations" option is grayed out (unckecked) in S4B, yet we are allowed to use Slack.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#157Ever since Lync(corporate IM system) got merged into Skype so that now it's just "skype for business" it's atrocious, easily the worst application I have on my PC.
If someone goes offline, Skype will show you how long they have been offline for. Except....that it's just a random number. I can set my status to offline right now, and my coworker will see that I've been offline for.....168 days. Or 700 days. Or 35 minutes.
Microsoft knew about this bug for years, and there is no fix for it.
Frequently, when I send messages to my coworkers, they appear ABOVE older messages in the coversation, which is extremely confusing, because obviously the whole window will flash to indicate you got a new message, but in reality you have to scroll up to actually see it.
Highlighting text is just broken, I dare anyone from MS to reliably highlight just a portion of text without the selection jumping to seemingly random part of the window without any indication how or why.
Arbitrarily low character limit, so you can't paste snippets of code.
During conference calls, audio just dies from time to time, and the only thing you can do about it is kill the conversation and start again. This is a product based off Skype, for fucks sake, that MS is charging us millions of dollars for globally, and that doesn't even have the basic functionality working correctly.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#158Ever since Lync(corporate IM system) got merged into Skype so that now it's just "skype for business" it's atrocious, easily the worst application I have on my PC. If someone goes offline, Skype will show you how long they have been offline for. Except....that it's just a random number. I can set my status to offline right now, and my coworker will see that I've been offline for.....168 days. Or 700 days. Or 35 minut…
The Skype for Business client is still essentially the same as when it was Lync 2013. In the early days of the rebranding, the version number had only jumped a couple dozen revision numbers, keeping the same major and minor versions, and still calling itself Lync 2013 on the about dialog. Changes on the server-side have been even less drastic.
Consumer Skype is still an entirely separate code base. The two IM platforms don't even speak the same protocol, and just barely interoperate.
The naming change is illogical as all hell, but Microsoft bought Skype, and suddenly Lync needed to be rebranded under the Skype umbrella. Before it was Lync, it was Office Communicator, before that Live Communicator, and before that, I believe went under an MSN name. It's always been hitched to the latest marketing bandwagon.
Lync/S4B is, sadly, one of the better enterprise IM systems, in comparison to other big players in that space, like Sametime, Jabber or Hipchat. It's still hot garbage.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#159Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.
I have such a passionate hate for S4B. This also happens to me, and the logging options mentioned below being enabled don't make a reliable difference: the logs don't always save! Additionally, group chats often split in to two windows where the conversation suddenly continues in a second thread even when no one joined/left... and then you try and reply and it jumps to another conversation on its own. People in my of…
In addition to the awful client application, the logging issue is really frikkin' annoying. Something simple like 'show log history for ' doesn't work.
I used to use Pidgin with the SIPE plugin, which worked well enough, and most importantly, logged in plain HTML with a fully working search mechanism, and if it came to it, I could just grep the folder.
Unfortunately my company recently moved to cloud-hosted S4B, and that completely broke Pidgin, so I've been forced onto the official client.
Someone at Microsoft really needs to learn the meaning of 'improvement'.
Re: Microsoft: You need to fix your Skype and Microsoft account issues, this is insane
#160Outlook doesn't validate email addresses correctly. Their validation is a complete failure. Even # isn't allowed in addresses. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.4