Saturday, December 05, 2009

Yet another Microsoft MCT Courseware Download Site Outage

As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, I am able to download courseware – both for study purposes and for the courses I deliver. Sadly, the site has been somewhat less than perfect of late. The latest incident is today: I simply can’t get to it at all:

image

Now another great benefit is the Regional Support centre. There’s a nice web form for reporting errors. But when I do, I get a canned reply, typically 2 days later, saying “we need a screen shot” – and without screen shots they just close the case. If a screen shot is needed, then why don’t a) they say so and b) provide me a mechanism to input it when I report the latest issue. I suppose this is more proof, as if it was needed, of MS’s internal/outsourced support being sub-optimal.

This is not the first time this site has failed – it’s doing it best to emulate a yo-yo. As a paying customer (MCTs have to pay for the privilege), I find these continuing issues to be unacceptable. Having complained privately, things just seem to get worse. It looks lik the only way to get this fixed is to go public. I will include the link to this blog post in the report to the support centre. I await their response.

If you have problems with this site, please post a comment here!

[Later] The problem resolved itself. After a couple of reboots, I tried again and it worked fine. I got a call 2 days later from the RSC saying they could not reproduce the issue.

3 comments:

James said...

I'm with you - it has got steadily worse, and don't get me started on about the learning library.

Unknown said...

has been upgraded to the cloud, try this now.
https://learningdownloadcenter.microsoft.com/CWDL_InstructionMember.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Unknown said...

Site has been migrated to the cloud , I hope it works better now :)

https://learningdownloadcenter.microsoft.com/CWDL_InstructionMember.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0