I had an interesting experience today.
On a regular basis I receive probably about 50-200 emails a week of questions and comments and requests from people. Some of them are rather interesting, some are downright insane. Some time I will write about the guy who wrote me about how I needed to remove my opening splash screen on my website because it is…. perverted…
Well anyway, I got a pretty good question from someone today about why adsiedit would show more attributes for an object than adfind or ldifde or ldp. I responded to the question, explaining that MS doesn’t return every populated attribute by default, some attributes need to be specifically asked for, some attributes can only be returned on base level queries, etc[1]. I was about to send it and I noticed that the ID was a v- (V dash) microsoft.com email address. This is an MS internal vendor ID, basically some contractor or consultant doing work on behalf of MS.
This piqued my interest because there are some pretty strict rules on usage of these accounts. Basically they need to be used for MS business. This sort of meant MS was asking me how their product worked. 😉 Well anyway, I asked about that usage and found out that the person was actually a PSS Exchange Support Engineer. Here I am giving free support to a support org that charges customers I work with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year… Kind of… ummm… interesting.
I don’t mind helping them out. I think a lot of the PSS folks can use it. I wish more were like this person and willing to ask for help versus just thinking they know how things work and making statements on that knowledge or lack of knowledge. PSS is the most visible Microsoft Support organization in existence. People have the highest expectations of their capability because by god, they work for the company writing this stuff. When they make mistakes, it is a very visible black eye on MS.
In the last week alone I have helped two different people working on issues for their respective companies that PSS was engaged on where PSS gave bad information. Unfortunately these folks didn’t have a ton of experience with PSS and didn’t realize that not everything said by PSS is golden.
Let me explain right now, there are good and bad people in PSS just like anywhere and that unfortunately, I have run into more bad than good. I have had many debates with a friend who used to be a CPR Engineer with PSS about the quality of info coming out of PSS. He thinks I am mean and too cynical, I think he didn’t get to really see what was going on in the trenches.
As a general rule, I personally assume PSS is wrong until they prove themselves right. This may not be a popular opinion and I am sure a lot of people would be pissed to hear me state it in a public forum, but it is how they have taught me to do things. My methods for working with PSS have been finely honed from years of working with them and seeing what works.
There are a few PSS Engineers I have worked with that I “trust” more than the usual PSS Engineers and there are some that I know the chances are what they are saying is almost certainly wrong without even having to check it. Note I am not even talking about the PSS engineers waiting by the phones for your $40 an hour phone call, I am talking Enterprise Level Alliance Support techs supporting Fortune 10 customers.
Anything told to you by PSS should be considered propaganda until proven true. As you work with the engineers more and more hopefully you can pick out analysts that consistently give good info for various topics. This is a safe way of doing things. If you get an analyst willing to say out loud, “I don’t know”. That is an engineer worth holding on to, admitting they don’t know is a great start, especially if the alternative is to just say shit which I have experienced more than once.
One of the most humorous moments was once when I was told by a PSS Alliance Engineer that Microsoft had secretly fixed the Linked Value Replication issue in a Windows 2000 hot fix… I was amazed and responded, you mean the fix that is in Windows 2003 that requires forest functional mode… Yep…. Why was I told this. Because they wanted me to stop asking questions about something I thought was a problem. It was handled by taking the conversation out of email and into a con call which was a normal mechanism for handling things when PSS was being pretty silly; the analyst in question couldn’t be on the call for some reason…
I figured out a few weeks later that the problem I thought might be a problem really wasn’t, I also figured out why it wasn’t, obviously it had nothing to do with a secret hidden Windows 2000 fix….
Anyway, kudos to the PSS Engineer not only willing to ask why or how something works, but willing to ask someone outside of MS.
joe
[1] Actually I have asked ~Eric to give details on exactly how to determine what would and wouldn’t be returned. It is on his stack of things to look at some day. 🙂
