bruceb news

Microsoft’s hosted Exchange mail service went down again this morning. Apparently service is now restored and most people are able to get back online, as of about 10:45am.

I haven’t lost faith in this service – it has too many advantages for that. But there have been several outages in the last six months, which doesn’t meet my expectations or your needs.

On June 28 Microsoft is going to roll out Office 365, the next generation of this service. It doesn’t bode well to have an outage six days before a product rollout that is meant to define a reliable platform for all businesses of all sizes.

Microsoft Online Services subscribers have two sources of information if there might be a problem with the service:

• The Service Health Dashboard. Sign in with your email address and MOS password. This is meant to be the primary source of all information about the services. It is troubling that the dashboard was also inaccessible this morning. There is a link on the Bruceb Favorites page under Computers / MS Online Services.
• The Microsoft Online Services forums. This is where people will complain when the system is down, as in this thread about today’s outage.