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Office 365: Suffer 18 Days' Outage, Still Pay Half Price

Posted by timothy on from the you-ungrateful-whelps dept.

rtfa-troll writes "Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year?) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer's data. Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again."

5 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. What summary leaves out ... by MacTO · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... is that more than 18 days of downtime results in a complete refund, 4 to 18 days of downtime results in a 50% refund, and 8 hours to 4 days of downtime results in a 25% refund. (Calculations are assuming 1 year of service, though I don't know how Microsoft does it.)

    This is not what I would call excellent, but it is several orders of magnitude better than the summary suggested.

  2. Frame it in the worse light possible by kervin · · Score: 5, Informative

    I actually thought the assurances were descent. Try looking at the SLA for your other cloud products to compare. Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.

    But what's sad is that the title of this 'article' and summary tries so obviously and desperately to frame the SLA in the worse possible light.

    How about reporting something newsworthy, like the fact that Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.5 Beta 2 ( Mango release ) to the entire development community yesterday.

    1. Re:Frame it in the worse light possible by Karzz1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.

      I call bullshit. I have had BPOS with my company for almost a year and have experienced several outages (I am keeping track because this was upper managments call against the advice of IT):

      22 June 2011
      http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-confirms-bpos-cloud-outage
      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/23/bpos_outage/

      10-13 May 2011
      http://www.katacinta.net/cinta/microsoft-online-outage-may-10/
      http://www.techworld.com.au/article/386384/outage_hits_hosted_exchange_customers/
      http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/hosted-exchange-customers-hit-service-outages-981
      http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216697/Microsoft_explains_recent_hosted_e_mail_outages

      6 March 2011:
      http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesexchange/thread/7017abf4-a9d9-4c08-85ac-f66912124493/
      19 October 2010
      http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesannouncements/thread/e72e8707-7457-4737-b246-2598769e54cf/
      3 & 7 September 2010 & 23 Aug 2010
      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-bpos-down-for-90-minutes-second-outage-in-a-month/7302
      http://mcpmag.com/articles/2010/09/10/microsoft-reports-major-bpos-outages-slas-affected.aspx
      http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/09/08/meeting-your-and-our-own-expectations.aspx
      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-apologizes-for-spate-of-recent-online-services-outages/7337

      --
      Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
  3. Re:A half month a year?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Microsoft is promising to be twice as good as Google Apps. Seriously, check it out:

    http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html

    For a service level of:

    >99.9% - Microsoft: full price, Google: full price
    >99.0% - Microsoft: 25% off, Google: 10% off
    >95.0% - Microsoft: 50% off, Google: 25% off
    <95.0% - Microsoft: 100% off, Google: 50% off

  4. Re:Slashdot... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You misunderstand Google's SLA. Microsoft's is actually better. Here's what Google actually promises:

    http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html