Microsoft botched all aspects of Exchange outage response

From InfoWorld: Microsoft blew it Tuesday when its Exchange Online hosted email service went dark for much of the business day, an expert said. But he wasn't referring to Exchange's technical failure.

"Three hundred and sixty-four days of excellent service can be undone on the 365th if a company doesn't communicate effectively," said Gene Grabowski, senior strategist at Levick, a Washington, D.C. firm that specializes in crisis communications.

Grabowski was talking about Tuesday's outage of Exchange Online, the hosted service that left hundreds, if not thousands of companies without email. Exchange Online is an off-premises service bundled with most Office 365 business plans, and also offered separately, and has been a key component in Microsoft's attempt to convince enterprises to adopt the "rent-not-own" software subscription service and shift more infrastructure to Microsoft-run data centers.

Grabowski blasted Microsoft, not for the outage -- those inevitably happen, he said -- but for its lack of communication to customers during the hours their email was unavailable, and even after the problem had been resolved.

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