IBM | Bluedepth's Journal

My day has walked into the deep pitch of the Microsoft tar-pit. I’ll dispense with the usual protestations that this technology is horrendous and anti-human and deserves to be loaded into an airlock and blown out into space, en route to the sun for ultimate destruction.

My god this is awful.

It all started very innocently enough with an iPhone for an ex-coworker that was asking for a new password. I had backed up the ex-coworkers email from Office 365 and to get access to do that I needed to change the password. That was easily done as I am the admin on our Office 365 email system. I changed the password, I then went to my “backup” computer account and started Outlook 2013, set up the ex-coworkers account on that machine and then went to backup the email using Outlook 2013’s PST file backup routine – that all worked just fine. Once I was done, I copied the PST file to a NAS drive, and that was that. Then another coworker who had the ex-coworkers phone came in because the device was complaining about a bad password, I had changed it and I didn’t know there was a device in play that needed this password update. Hooray for never throwing away 3M sticky notes! So I put the password in and I got into a conversation with the coworker who had the device. I offered to delete the account of the ex-coworker and assign him the alias for the ex-coworker thereby ensuring that mail flows unimpeded to where it ought to go. Everything was all right and proper. So I went into Office 365 admin control and deleted the old user. Then I went to assign the alias to the other account so the mail would flow properly. Office 365 complained that the old account was still around and couldn’t establish the alias. Turns out the account lives in a 30-day penalty box and won’t actually be deleted until we all wait 30 days.

So how do you purge this account from this 30-day limbo? You can do so with a handy-dandy Powershell command called “Remove-MsolUser”. So I open up Powershell and start entering all the bullshit commands to get it connected to Office 365. Arcane and labyrinthine has nothing on this crap, I can’t even begin to estimate just how awful this really is. So I get the Powershell up and connected and waiting at the prompt. Then I enter the command as I see it on this website and I get an error from Powershell that it doesn’t recognize the cmdlet. Okay. So then I look into how to solve this issue, turns out I need to upgrade to Powershell 3.0. I find another website that helps me find the version of Powershell that I have installed, it’s a registry hack, so in I go, HKLM blah blah blah. Turns out I have Powershell Verison 2. I need 3. So I download Powershell 3.0 for 64-bit like I should, and it refuses to load saying I have a later version installed. I find another website and figure out how to get the version of Powershell from Powershell itself, turns out I have version 4.0. Fuckity-Ok! So then I move on, and find that I need two more downloads from Microsoft, the first is “Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals” and so I download it. I install it, everything is just fine. Next stop is to install the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Module for Windows Powershell. I’ve got all my ducks in a row and then this last install fails – “In order to install Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell, you must have Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant version 7.0 or greater installed on this computer. So then I looked at the Programs list in Control Panel and found the exact application that I had installed earlier, version 7.25! So what the hell is wrong?!? So I then rebooted, and repaired the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant and then rebooted again, then retried the installer and the same error. I then copied this error into Google and found an article that pointed me to “Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals BETA”. It installs and forces another reboot, of course. Once that bit was installed, which worked properly, gah, it was back to the Land of Eternal Stench, also known as PowerShell.

And only then, at the end are we finally successful. All of this for the simple little effort to dump an unwanted email account from our Office 365 system quickly!

I can’t believe it took this much to get through to this solution. I don’t really understand how Microsoft is still in business. This awful lack of quality in any other situation would spell certain disaster for a company. Microsoft is apparently charmed. Actually, it isn’t charm as much as monopoly. Microsoft has a lock on business computing beyond all rational logic and just like IBM in the 70’s and 80’s, once you are locked in, you are stuck and have to smile and thank your masters for dropping crumbs that they allow you to feast on. Even if their products are complete crap, they’ve got the lock and they are using it. Hello again, IBM.

I attended for a little while the Tech’now’logy Expo that TotalTech puts on every year. In attendance was my friend Matt Merrill with CDW-G and Chris Doemel with Apple.

They are pretty much two out of maybe a handful of vendors that I do not want to pitch into a swirling abyssal vortex. The expo itself was a little lean on actual vendors, but HP and Dell were there, and my CDW-G vendor was flogging Lenovo pretty hard. I hadn’t the heart to really bust down Lenovo despite it being a cross between an IBM Stink-Pad and Cheap Chinese Plastic Crap. I can’t really get down on Lenovo too harshly, at least there wasn’t a Lexmark pusher there! Lexmark gets pitched into that aforementioned vortex.

Apple was pleasant as usual. I really love the company, and AppleCare itself can’t be beat, but my previous run-ins with Apple Sales has left me feeling a little quixotic. They aren’t as hold-your-hand as the rest of Apple is, but they are attentive and the reflected glory from the mothership in Cupertino does them a lot of good, but while I’m seeking out the ARD Development Team for body-breaking hugs, the sales team has always left me feeling rather tepid. They respond very positively when you tell them you’re sending clients their way, but everything else isn’t really that exciting for them, which I totally understand, but it is a little surprising that sales isn’t as rabid as the rest of them are.

Something that is coming up is iOS management. I’ve got a new systems contact at Apple, a fellow by the name of David Seebaldt. Should be interesting to see what he is going to recommend for us. Currently we’ve got 6 iPads in play and 3 iPhones. I fully expect that level to rise with time. I think one of my first queries will be why iPhone, and no other iOS device displays a single-Library preference. iPod Touches, iPod Nanos, and even iPads can touch as many iTunes Libraries as they like, but iPhones? One central library, the first one they see, and that’s it. It’s as if the iPhone imprints on the first Library it sees and that’s it for life. Odd.

I certainly hope that they get more foot traffic, because the lunch-time period wasn’t so rah-rah-rah.

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