I participated in the Exchange and SharePoint Online Services Live Chat on Tuesday, Feb 23rd. This event was a first for me. It added a new level of “interrupt-driven” to the usual IM and e-mail traffic that we deal with every day. It’s hard to provide deep technical information in an IM chat format, but I think we were able to answer most questions and to direct people to useful information.
I was impressed by the quality of the questions. Most of the participants had obviously done their homework. It sounded like many people were already BPOS customers or involved in a Trial. I’d say the most common questions were about migration and co-existence, which is always a hot topic for people just getting started with the service. SharePoint Online questions ran a close second.
I was surprised that we received only one off-topic question, “I have a Brother printer and just purchased Windows 7. I need a link to download some software so the printer works like it should.” I was happy to field this one and direct the person to the Brother website.
My favorite question was the one asking for a service architecture diagram. For security reasons, the details of our data-center and hosting architecture are proprietary, but I remembered a high-level diagram that we had previously shared publicly. It took me a few hours to track down that diagram, and a few more hours to discover that it was now out of date. This triggered a request to update the diagram and to get the necessary engineering and legal approval to publish the new version. I think it's great to be able to respond directly to customer requests. That’s what community is all about.
Speaking of Community, you can get involved in the Microsoft Online Services Community through the following links.