Is Microsoft for real when it comes to Office 365 and the cloud?!?

by matsan

Posted on August 4, 2020

12

As admin of a modest Office 365 organization I came a cross the following message when adding a new user:

“Due to increased demand, it might take up to 24 hours to fully set up ‎user‎ in Teams. Until then, you won’t be able to assign Teams policies to them, and they might not have access to Teams features like calling and audio conferencing.”

Come on guys – do you have to send a person to the server-room to install a new license or what?!?

Sigh!

Comments (14)

14 responses to “Is Microsoft for real when it comes to Office 365 and the cloud?!?”

  1. arnstarr

    That message has been there since March. I've never noticed any provisioning delays. I suppose they are managing expectations.

    1 year ago
    0

  2. wright_is

    This warning has been in place since March. Generally it takes only a few minutes, but I've seen it take nearly an hour at times.

    Don't forget, usage has exploded since the COVID lockdowns. At peak times, the processing queue for activating and integrating new users can take time to complete and users already on the system have priority.

    Also, if you just happen to add a new user at the same time as a large organisation updates user profiles / adds a bunch of new users per script, your 1 user is going to be lost among the tens of thousands of other requests, so it might take time to process.

    1 year ago
    0

  3. matsan

    Yeah - took me nearly two hours before I could set the newly created user as owner of a channel...

    1 year ago
    0

  4. minke

    Personally, I'm more worried about OneDrive for business syncing. I get a failed upload nearly every day, and once in awhile it just stops working for a period of time. I have no confidence that everything I actually want uploaded to OneDrive is actually there without checking each time, and that is a waste of time. Google seems to have had this working perfectly forever--just works, and they too must have had a huge surge in use during the pandemic. Just imagine all the increased use by students!

    1 year ago
    0

    • matsan

      In reply to Minke:

      Most of us are on Macs anyway and the Mac version of OneDrive is very unstable in general and most of us don't bother installing it. Strange that Word, Excel and PowerPoint are rock-solid and modern but OneDrive is left behind.

      1 year ago
      0

      • minke

        In reply to matsan: On Macs mostly here too. Hardly a day goes by that I don't encounter some OneDrive problem.


        1 year ago
        0

      • Paul Thurrott

        Who is "most of us"? Most of us are on PCs. :)
        1 year ago
        0

        • jedwards87

          In reply to paul-thurrott:

          I am hoping the smiley face means you know he meant his organization but considering how much Apple hate you have clouding your brain I could see how you missed that. :)

          1 year ago
          0

        • sgbassett

          In reply to paul-thurrott: This is an industry by industry and organization by organization thing. I work in the legal profession. For most of my 39 years doing this work, law has been overwhelmingly Windows (when I started, we were still on IBM Mag Card typewriters and System 6 dedicated word processors). Sure, Macs have made inroads now that there is more platform agnostic cloud-based legal software and there is some parity between Office on Mac and Office on Windows, but the Mac is not a huge player in the legal market.

          Part of the reason Macs have not done better in law is that many lawyers depend on MS Word add-in programs to generate tables of authority, do cite checking, legal-specific format and grammar checking, etc., that only run in Windows. They likely won't run in Windows on ARM, however, meaning that ARM-based Windows machines are not likely to sell to the legal market.

          On Windows, I've had very few problems with OneDrive. I run it on my primary desktop PC (self built), my laptop, and on my iPad Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10e. I even run it successfully on my Lenovo Chromebook Duet tablet.

          I also teach law practice management at a law school in Florida. Probably 80% plus of my law students use Macs, but I hear from my former students who tell me that after graduation, while they may keep their Mac for personal use, at the law firms where they work, it is nearly all Windows.

          But getting back to Teams, I wanted my class to use software they might actually encounter in the real world instead of something limited to the academic setting like Black Board. I created a Team for the class back in January and as I became more familiar with it, we increased its use as the semester progressed. Then, when the pandemic hit and we had to go to distance learning in March after Spring Break, it was simple to do the class using Teams video meetings. My students report that they liked Teams better than Zoom or other solutions used by some of their other professors. We never had any performance issues with Teams, including adding guest speakers to join us by video.

          The biggest issue wasn't the performance of Teams. It was substandard bandwidth many of the students had in their homes/apartments, which they often had to share with roommates who were also simultaneously required to participate in video classes. Also, the fact that so many of the students were using MacBooks or other thin and light laptops without Ethernet ports, meant they were limited to using Wi-Fi for the class sessions. We all know that can be unstable, especially in crowded dorm and apartment settings, and especially if they are using the weak Wi-Fi inherent in ISP provided equipment. I urged the students to buy USB C to Ethernet dongles and circulated Amazon, Staples, and Office Depot links for some reasonably priced ones. In the end, I think a few bought them. Others probably figured "why bother" with only a few weeks left in the semester, assuming (not unreasonably) that things would be back to normal (meaning in-person classes) by fall.


          1 year ago
          0

    • red.radar

      In reply to Minke:

      Personally I find OneDrive rather stable for Home use and even most Business users. The only time I have struggled with OneDrive is when I am subscribed to multiple SharePoint Directories and I am doing heavy multitasking out of my OneDrive for Business and those Sharepoint libraries.


      I believe most of my issues are related to how my company has deployed One-drive as a backup policy. So every file I open on my desktop throughout the User folder gets synced. And One-drive is a little aggressive monitoring for any little change. It works great for Office files but any cad work it seems to choke on it. During the day my onedrive icon in the system tray stays a constant cloud with updating orb. So its not uncommon that I get file save collisions and it want's to create multiple copies of the same thing. That isn't too bad. The beef I have is that every interaction has to get checked with a cloud server so my computer gets bottlenecked by the latency and quality of my internet connection. I have incredible local computing power for my work....but i get hosed by the ittty bitty or congested internet connection.


      However, I think those are all solvable issues and related to how its deployed and not to the product itself. I found most of the complaints around One-drive are sourced in emotional reactions due to changes in workflow and perceived lack of file system control people feel they have.


      Its a good product. Its better than anything else we have used that is for sure.

      1 year ago
      0

  5. max daru

    I provision 1 to 2 new Microsoft 365 users a week on average. I've had it take from 1 minute to 60 minutes for the process to complete. I can't recall it taking longer than an hour.

    1 year ago
    0

  6. lvthunder

    I wish you could add them to groups when you create the account instead of having to do it afterwards.

    1 year ago
    0

  7. winner

    I've observed for a long, long time that getting the details right is not a Microsoft strength.

    They do, however seem to excel in marketing, inventing long convoluted names and terms and then renaming everything periodically. It would be nice if they would move that attention to their actual products' quality.

    1 year ago
    0

Leave a Reply

We use cookies to improve your browsing experience.

Find out more about our cookie policy here.