Microsoft hits stubborn volume licensing site with more updates Microsoft has once again tweaked its volume licensing website, just seven months after its disastrous makeover in December last year. In February the software vendor finally admitted to The Register that its overhauled but hamstrung volume licensing site was still only slowly processing customer and partner details. Worse …
“We have reached out to many partners and customers around the world through Live Meetings, interviews, hands-on usability studies, customer and partner surveys, forums, and events to gather input and feedback on how to improve the VLSC. We take this feedback seriously and are continually incorporating their suggestions into the VLSC,”
...as if the bloke who wrote it has left.
We are predominantly a Linux company. Although trading for 7 years, we had never needed to sell a Microsoft Volume license... until a couple of month ago.
The process took 6 weeks, 18 phone calls and 4 emails. Initially, for some reason the site didn't work in IE8, but did using Google chrome. That got us into the site.
Next we couldn't order, it was 2 separate problems and MS said they wouldn't be able to fix it for at least a couple of weeks.
We eventually got told to call our distributor can get them to order it for us this time. MS then sent the paperwork to the client to sign and fax back, except the client never received the emails.
Eventually we got the paperwork sent to us and we passed it on. It was signed and sent back to MS. Turns out it was the wrong paper work that had been signed so we went through the same process again.
6 weeks after we start the process we have actually got the licenses. We worked out we lost about £2k in wasted billable man-hours... it was for 10 copies of MS office for goodness sake!!
Seriously MS, sort it out. Everyone I've spoken to about this has their own horror story.
Will we sell these licenses again? Only if we absolutely have too and we'll quadruple the price!!
We're also a M$ shop, and I hate going to their volume licensing website in order to get keys for our installations...
In contrast, Linux is really user-friendly, there is no product keys or licensing nonsense to be entered at all... just install and work without having to worry about product activation or windows genuine advantage messing things up.
evil billg because that's what his billywindows does to people...
I work for a small IT shop that does outsourced IT for small & medium businesses. We manage everything for our customers. Now I have to jump through hoops to process volume license purchases for customers.
The biggest hurdle is that now the e-mail address of the end-user MUST be used to initially place a license into VLSC.
Great. I love it when customers have used their business addresses for personal MSN use. Customers will gladly give me passwords for the domain administrator, for their accounting software, and for anything else. But personal Live accounts get changed frequently Just Because. It's annoying.
Microsoft has the customer's money. Resellers should be able to process on behalf of, without jumping through hoops.
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