Monthly Archives: September 2015

An o365 Support case that was handled so quickly, I had to write about it!

Cloud, O365, SharePoint, Troubleshooting

I was so impressed with how fast this was turned around, I had to write about it…

A special shout out to Microsoft Sr. Escalation Engineer Sridhar Narra and the support team including Linda Porcelli, Loren Jacobson and Tiffany Evenson who worked to resolve this issue so quickly!

Apparently in email addresses, the single quote is a legal character.

So names like: Bill.O’Brian@yourcompany.com are legal in the email sense.

Addresses like this can cause havoc on programmers.

Well it turns out that we had a few people like this in our company and this did not play well with Office 365 at all.

The first, and easiest thing we noticed was that if you found a person like Bill O’Brian in search and tried to click on them, the profile page for the user threw an error.

We opened a case with Microsoft and I was expecting something short like “Don’t use quotes in your email” but instead, they looked into and fixed it. FAST.

I’m used to changes in o365 taking 3 months to make it from ticket to production, this one took a few weeks, from the time we opened the ticket, to the time the issue was resolved in production.

This is a pace of improvement and change I’ve not seen until now and it’s really exiting to see things get fixed this quickly!

A special shout out to Microsoft Sr. Escalation Engineer Sridhar Narra and the support team including Linda Porcelli, Loren Jacobson and Tiffany Evenson who worked to resolve this issue so quickly!

As a side note, a  quotation mark in an email address has issues in other places of SharePoint. Our case was split into several cases. Sridhar’s team worked on the profile page, There’s another team looking at another case which I’ll update in the future when I have more information.  If your organization has issues similar to this, please open a premier ticket.

– Jack

 

A quick update on where I’ve been…

Cloud, Deep Thoughts by SharePoint Jack, O365, Presenting, SharePoint

I noticed today that I haven’t posted anything in a while here- notably the entire month of August. That’s partly due to vacation schedules in the summer – I went on a family vacation then went to Laracon for 4 days in Kentucky to learn more about PHP the programming language that powers more websites in the world than any other language. (Like 81%!)

Investing in On premise SharePoint today feels like putting new tires on a car you’re going to junk in 2 months.

Another reason though, is that as we move to office 365, my job role is changing. It’s been a good year now since I’ve built up a new on premise farm for work, and even the announcement of SharePoint 2016 on-premise doesn’t really excite me.  It appears that on-premise has a limited future, and the cloud is the direction of the future, not just for SharePoint but for lots of technologies.  Investing in On premise SharePoint today feels like putting new tires on a car you’re going to junk in 2 months.

So as I work more with o365 and less with on premise, the issues I face are different.  In August I created a series of 20 or so SPO training videos and put them up in the Office 365 video portal (that I’ll be talking about in my talk at SPSTC in October) That took a good part of my free time.

I’ve spent a lot of time opening issues with Microsoft. Today I have a success story to share, which I’ll post separately on. I believe I have another success story coming in Late October that’s HUGE for the SharePoint community, and critical for the migration to o365 from on premise.

As always, thanks for stopping by!