The issues with EOP support is just one of the many issues that I have with Office365 support in General. (its not any better for Lync, SharePoint, yammer, Exchange, etc). The one thing that is consistent across the support options (regular, premier, partner) is that if you even remotely do anything that is not a basic configuration or setting, they are absolutely baffled and it takes a lot of prodding to get anyone to look into the issue.
I have a very complex email infrastructure (60+ email domains, on-prem exchange users, gmail users, on-prem Domino users, multiple business units each managing their own environments, etc) and anytime I have an Exchange Related issue of any kind, it is always the ON-PREM complexity is causing the exchange online mailboxes to fail. Example of this was several users had their mailboxes flagged as Quarantined. For 3 days MS blamed my on-prem solution for causing it, then when I finally found someone that was able to look at the server those mailboxes were on, all of the mailboxes (other customers as well) were in quarantine mode because of a failed exchange update. If you are an o365 customer with under 10 people and everyone is 100% cloud based you might get some good support. If you have more than 10 users and any kind of complexity forget about it. o365 support is not ready for primetime for business and/or Enterprise Level support. And to the MS folks that monitor this list, all of this has been very well documented through all of the channels, (sales, markerting, support, management, and executives). The only answer I have gotten from MS is that they are aware that support is awful, and they are working on addressing it, on the Premier side they are adding more support folks, of course the last dozen or so that I have had to deal with have all been from India or China and English is not a first, second, third, or fourth language for most of these people, so the support process takes 10x as long because you have to keep explaining the problem over and over again. Mike From: xyz Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 9:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Exchange] RE: Change in cloud EOP support? Greetings Mike and thanks for responding, as I was thinking no one else is looking into the support issues. This could be because others have not made the change yet – so beware of support issues. Since I started the thread, I will report on status for my issues. MS Premier has been no help – as noted in my thread – where MS cannot help anymore. Working with a very good O365 migration consultant, we now believe that our problem started when new A3 licenses were installed as we prepared for our O365 cloud migration. In my original Premier ticket, I noted that license install could be an issue, but was told by MS they cannot assist for unknown reasons other than that no longer supported due to privacy matters. Review today on my end with consultant shows that the license install likely blew out the entire EOP configuration – meaning everything flows through to on premise servers – which may be a default configuration? Very frustrated that MS Premier and our TAM was not able to inform me of this, but again, they indicate they only provide very limited EOP support now. As an aside, out TAM indicated this is the first time he had heard of this change of support, so that is a concern as well. We will re-configure EOP on Wednesday to get the settings back to where they were, but we understand that currently MS Premier cannot help if there are any issues. Buyer be aware on this EOP product and check out/verify your support options. Please let me know with any questions. Thank you Dana From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Tavares Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 6:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Exchange] RE: Change in cloud EOP support? It is so good to hear someone else come to the same conclusion about EOP that I have come up with. It is absolutely one of the worst products MS has implemented, and if the product itself doesn’'t suck so bad, try getting any kind of support on it. I have gone through regular support, I have gone through Premier Support, I have gone through partner support. I have had the EOP product manage team call me to address my concerns, and all I ever get from them is the product was not designed for that, or it’s a limitation of the product, or the best line was from the Product Manager, Spammers would never forge a from line so we don’t check for that. So all of my mail continues to go through a 3rd party service. I am not holding my breath that EOP will ever be a product worth using. From: Michael B. Smith Sent: Monday, July 28, 2014 10:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Exchange] RE: Change in cloud EOP support? Long story short: EOP sucks. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of xyz Sent: Monday, July 28, 2014 10:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Exchange] Change in cloud EOP support? Greetings, Just a heads up and wondering if anyone else has seen new MS support polices yet? EXCHANGE 2010 SP2 RU3 1200 faculty/staff users. We converted from Cloud FOPE to EOP in January 2014 per MS indicating I had to do this within 30 days or no more email delivery. I did this months ago ( a few issues conversion issues which MS resolved ) but all has been working with NO changes: UNTIL 7/23/14 – when we had a flood of user calls with all kinds of SPAM coming into our on premise EXCHANGE 2010 servers from numerous users. As many know with EOP, the quarantine message now can come daily, vs EOP where it was 3 days. Checking with numerous users, no one I spoke with has even had a quarantine message since this problem started so the EOP quarantine process seems to be broken. I opened a ticket with Premier Support and included a couple of clips below with the response. Hard to understand, but summary I was told that the only way to currently deal with SPAM is to inform all 1200 users how to submit SPAM emails on an individual basis to the MS SPAM link. I was told that no one at MS is able to access our EOP other than the SPAM group and that they only deal with the individual SPAM submission, not our EOP. To be fair to MS, they did send me this link to create new transport rules. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj837173(v=exchg.150).aspx Not sure I want to make major changes to production and why we would want this stuff going into on premise, rather than being quarantined and since they have to be hands off, not sure if they will help if something breaks. Anyway, clips below from TAM and Premier support. Thank you Dana Per Premier Support: ##### Hi Dana, Thanks for your patience. This is sort of a canned response but if you were previously a FOPE client and have worked with us on that service, there have been a few changes to how you deal with spam under EOP and O365. Previously we were able to take your samples and direct them to the anti spam team. This is no longer the case per se, as you must now use the spam submission tool for outlook and/or the manual option. Please see this link, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200769(v=exchg.150).aspx, it will explain how to do it. Now, that being said, I do have the ability to work with the team directly if needed. At this point it is best to recommend that you send me a few of the same examples that you submit via the tool. Please put the raw .msg files in a zip (3-4 of them) and I will take a look. Make sure that your users are not forwarding them to you but rather attaching them so the original headers are retained. There is not much I can do but make recommendations based on the contents of the email themselves, only the anti spam team can now make changes to the edge servers other than the options in the EAC which you can turn on and off (we no longer have access to client interfaces like we did in the previous product due to new privacy laws in the US). If you can send me the samples, I’d be happy to assist, but make sure the same samples are submitted to the anti spam team so that if I have to escalate to them, the submissions are already there waiting. Per Our TAM: ### I haven’t run into this until now but from the engineer’s response, it is quite clear that due to new privacy laws in the US, the engineers no longer have access to the client interfaces. You should definitely work with the engineer to get him some examples of SPAM you are receiving but also make sure you submit the SPAM examples with that tool to the ant-spam team since they are the ones who can make changes on the edge servers if changes are required.
