I am a bit of a fan of OfficeLive seeing as it’s built on WSS 3.0, so I was extremely disappointed at my experience of it today. I had told a colleague of mine to set up a new website using OfficeLive Premium for some work we’ll be doing together. He came back to me today and said that he couldn’t create an additional email user. Okay, that’s strange I thought as there’s not much room for user error. I logged in and true enough we were getting the “The mailbox could not be created at this time. Please try again later”. That didn’t seem right to me and then I realised I couldn’t see the default admin user in the Email User’s list although I could access the Inbox. However, when I signed out of Live Mail it threw a Server Application Error. Ooops, not good at all!! Now I knew this was messed up on the server side. So I rang the Support number and a very nice man reset the default password and tried it himself and verified it wasn’t anything to do with my set up, network, firewall, etc – the usual things that support people assume or have on their script to ask. So, he escalated this up to the Server Support Team and told me it might take a couple of days to fix. He asked me what Operating System I was using so I told him Vista Ultimate with IE 7.0. To my surprise he told me that there were issues with OfficeLive and Vista and that I should in future use an alternative OS. Huh? …what like Linux? I thought that but didn’t say it! I asked him if the issues were documented anywhere that he could point me to. Nope, I should go and Live Search it – for heaven’s sake I thought! What issue could there be with using Vista and OfficeLive when it came to making System Changes from the Member Center, it’s just being accessed via a browser???

The reply I got from my colleague was that he hoped this didn’t turn into a nightmare like he’d recently had with 1and1. Doh!! Thanks Microsoft, there I was saying what a great system this was and how Microsoft knew how to run Enterprise systems and the first thing I get is a “Server Application Error”!!!