Doug's Mailbag: Licensing Site Snags, More
Doug wrote this week about some problems customers have been having with Microsoft's revamped licensing Web sites. Here are some of your stories:
I've been unable to access my products for nearly a month at this point. Contacting Microsoft to fix the issue is met with all the urgency and competency that one would expect from a giant, lethargic monopoly.
-Steve
I have run into the Microsoft license portal problems. I had to place a support call and wait awhile before the problem was resolved. The problem was I could not see a new purchased license, which I had to activate to be able to use. Older data was visible.
-Craig
This has been a huge hindrance for me. I haven't been able to administer benefits since they "upgraded" the site in December. I sent a number of e-mails to support; no response. Tried calling, and was placed on terminal hold forever. Given the amount of money we pay every year for our EA, this is NOT good.
I finally asked my sales rep if we'll get one month off of our EA renewal. That finally got some action.
-Anonymous
We completely lost access to all our expired Open license agreements. The big problem with this is that the old agreements contain the actual licence purchase; the current ones only are renewals of SA. Therefore, when we look at our license summary, all our licences are now unresolved!
-Daryl
We bought volume licenses in December for Windows 2008, Exchange and Office. Haven't been able to get to the licenses and download the products yet! Still trying.
-Lou
Microsoft recently pulled some versions of Word to comply with the i4i ruling. Brandon thinks a little warning would've been nice:
Why did they pull Word off the e-open and MSDN download sites last week?! We are a gold partner and had a customer that purchased 100 copies of Word. After getting the license key, we had no way to download it for them! We couldn't use the full suite and only install Word because the key wouldn't work.
After six hours on the phone with Microsoft, they finally determined that Word was pulled from the site because of this lawsuit and they had no way for us to get access to it. We have not received any e-mails from MS about this issue. Where is the communication to partners? This does not make MS partners look very good to the customer.
-Brandon
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/15/2010 at 1:17 PM