Has Microsoft paid support been worth it to you?

Question

I saw this quote in this question:

MS support is poor, except when you've paid for a support contract... then its very very good. – gbjbaanb

This got me thinking. My company has had 2 support incidents with Microsoft a few months ago (before Stackoverflow was live). In both cases, we were pushing the limits of the SharePoint system we were building, and the API did not expose events to let us know when operations were completed. Both times, Microsoft's response was to tell us to add a Thread.Sleep() call and just wait for the operation to finish.

Now, I am all for the community working together to answer questions, but sometimes there just aren't answers to your question available online.

For the times when you can't find an answer, has paid support been worth it to you?

If you have had success with Microsoft paid support, please share what type of problem it was. I am trying to understand exactly what to expect from a support incident.

Answer 1

Yes it has. If you have made an effort to solve the problem yourself, you have to get to at least the third person before you get anybody who will understand the issue, and maybe the fourth person can help.

Once you get to that person, though -- I've found the support to be unbelievably good with a lot of followup and I even had an MS support person help me solve a complex ASP.NET deployment issue with one of our customers.

Answer 2

Yes, I have had an opportunity to use paid support from Microsoft. I was working for a dot-com and we were having intermittent crashes on our main site which used ASP. I had been asked to run this utility to generate a crash dump when the error popped up on the site and had sent a few in to be analyzed. The analysis suggested that the number of string concatenations being done in the code was a potential issue as this was causing the memory to fragment and that led to the issue as the code had hundreds of concatenations, sometimes where the code didn't even need to do it, e.g. in a line there would be " blah blah blah " & " more more more" where the & is unnecessary and causing part of the issue, as well as suggesting that a string array may be better for handling taking string after string to build part of the response for some pages.

Answer 3

It's been mixed.

If you get lucky and talk to the right person they can provide invaluable insight.

On the other hand you might end up with another sympathetic pair of eyes. This can be helpful but not worth the money.

Answer 4

I've only had one experience with Microsoft support, and in that instance I found it to be lacking. After a few hours on the phone they concluded that there was no way to solve my problem (unable to modify any website settings in IIS) and we would have to reinstall everything. I later found a way to fix it myself without going through all of that by manually editing a file. This was about 8 years or so ago though, I haven't had to deal with them since then.

Answer 5

I too have had a good experience, but as with some of the others I will say that you have to escalate the issue typically to get resolution. Once you do though, they follow-through very well, and provided detailed assistance.

Answer 6

I have had amazingly good luck calling MS for support. Usually, calling any large company for support is a nightmare. The exceptions, for me, have been MS and Oracle. In the case of MS, I have made 3 calls to them, 2 of which were IT related and one was a programming or Visual Studio related problem. Sorry I don't remember what the issues were. I recall having a little trouble understanding one of the reps due to accent differences between us, but he was very good and we got through it. This was about 3 years ago.

One other thing is I have found that the reps want to give you a break. If it is a bug, they won't charge you, and all the reps were very fair on this in my experience.