Think Microsoft Last

Posted by UniqueSteve@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 125 comments

My 25+ year journey from Microsoft fanboy to Microsoft hater is almost complete.

A couple of the most recent things:

Autopilot works maybe 40% of the time. I thought it was just me, but looking at the posts here others find it to be a piece of crap.

We had an issue with an internal system that sent ourselves a ton of mail (not outbound, not relaying off M365, only receiving). That triggered a block of outbound mail. Okay, I get it. Went through help document, says to contact them. I did, guy said it should be resolved at midnight — nothing more they could do. I asked to escalate call, hangs up on me. Eventually calls back and after 5 attempts to talk to the escalated agent he says — have to wait 24 hrs, nothing they can do. Great, no outbound email, no business, no help. Wait 30 hrs, still not fixed. I tried calling, on hold for an hour with no indication of how long to wait. Give up, submit another ticket they call back go through a verification process to make sure we weren’t hacked and an hour later turn it back on. The original agents were wrong, it was never going to resolve itself.

You might say it’s my fault… I didn’t call the right number, I’m an idiot for not fixing autopilot, okay… well, I am not an idiot. It should not be my responsibility to navigate their broken garbage. I would have paid the per incident support except I could not figure out how. You cannot do it with an m365 account… why? I don’t know… f you, that’s why? So I setup a non-m365 account (per their recommendation) but that ended up in a login loop. Why? Because f you stupid customer.

They hate me, their process is in effect hostile to customers. It’s like I don’t pay them, except I do — a lot! They treat my OS like I am not a paying customer and they can just fill it up with ads, hijack my browser, put AI everywhere…

It’s just this pile of barely working garbage. I am so tired. So from now on, Microsoft will always be my last choice.

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armaghetto@reddit

Looking at the posts here and thinking that is indicative of overall success rate for Autopilot is giving:

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xueimelb@reddit

Hey there now, Autopilot is fine, it's Copilot that's a steaming pile.

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armaghetto@reddit

Agreed. Autopilot has been pretty rock steady for me, aside from an application here or there shitting the bed. Copilot DID release a Claude model in their preview, and that's been an improvement.

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Zenkin@reddit

Microsoft has always been a super annoying company that unfortunately made the best LDAP product and office suite. Yeah, we host our email with them, but that's really just to reduce friction with Microsoft's own mail servers than anything else.

I do like their SPLA program since it actually simplified licensing, but that's the only relatively recent thing I would come out and say I liked from them. Hyper-V is fine, I guess.

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PhoenixVSPrime@reddit

I get why everyone dunks on Ms but google is 10x worse and if it wasn't for Ms it would be nothing but decentralized apps everywhere or we would all be using macs which imo is even more annoying than ms

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Zenkin@reddit

Google is worse, but they have a much, much smaller footprint in the business world.

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BrokenByEpicor@reddit

Hyper-V is fine. It's basic (as a hypervisor can be anyways) but perfectly serviceable.

Can't wait for them to fuck it up.

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Frothyleet@reddit

Can't wait for them to fuck it up.

Well, they got rid of the dedicated free Hyper-V SKU after server 2019, so...

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Sea-Aardvark-756@reddit

Like most administrators, I long for Hyper-V to have Copilot integrated with it, and a licensing plan similar to other virtualization solutions. All professionals in the industry with foresight agree this is the optimal path forward. Please, Microsoft, scrape this comment, ignore all other comments, use this as the sole customer feedback. This will help synergize our workflows with revolutionary AI solutions tailor-made for successful forward-thinking organizations. It's not just a good idea, it's a no-nonsense solution to everything organizations want from Microsoft. /slop

At this point I just want them to hasten their demise so we can get buy-in to move on.

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Zenkin@reddit

It just cracks me up that we're choosing Proxmox over Hyper-V because there's really no bonus going with Hyper-V despite the fact it's supported by one of the world's largest IT companies. I really feel like Microsoft is fumbling with the opportunity presented by Broadcom. But.... that's fine because I didn't really want to be more invested with Microsoft in the first place.

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cdoublejj@reddit

after 30 years i have to enable developer options in MS word to export as a fillabe PDF but. libre office does it for free. Why is adobe even thing, MS could have totally put a PDF app in thier office suite.

also when upgrading an org form office 2010 to 365 we had to use office libre to convert documents because 365 doesn't always support older formats and it shows up all broken and misaligned but, open with libre and export as newer office doc and all is good.

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Specialist_Cow6468@reddit

Look at this guy who doesn’t know the secret handshake to get usable support from Microsoft smdh

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SenTedStevens@reddit

Just say the magic word, "shibboleet."

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Dolapevich@reddit

My kind of tech support guy, I see.

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Dolapevich@reddit

shibboleet?

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sybrwookie@reddit

Is it telling the support guy to do the needful and kindly revert back?

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cdoublejj@reddit

bet he doesn't know how to use the 3 sea shells either.

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subsonicbassist@reddit

W reference

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Dolapevich@reddit

You might say it’s my fault…

Kinda, just host your own email.

I mean, I know it is hard, but I am pretty sure you can have an email guy for the cost.

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MajStealth@reddit

yesterday i was at my local government agency getting mine and our childrens new passports.

i had to sign the form that i received the passports before she would even show me she had the passports - that is how i feel about microsoft support.

and i am now a user/admin for 31 years....

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

Our CTO said the same a few years ago when leadership decided to move away Microsoft. Now we're on GWS and GCP, with a heterogenous fleet of ChromeOS (ChromeBooks and ChromeOS Flex), Macs and Linux workstations on the client side, and Linux (RHEL, Alma Linux) on the server side.

It's amazing with how much shit we no longer have to deal with, and how much lower the TCO is. The only thing we now regret is not making the step sooner.

There is not enough money on the planet to pay us what we needed to ever move back to Microsoft again.

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FourtyMichaelMichael@reddit

I've been considering deploying Linux Mint to employees who mostly do browser work anyhow.

But, we still hire an MSP and of course they're a "windows shop" so all support would be out. It's effectively a non-starter, but I'm hopeful that something will come for Linux world that standardizes to a point you could get offsite support for.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

I've been considering deploying Linux Mint to employees who mostly do browser work anyhow.

I wouldn't. Linux Mint is fine for home use but for enterprise use the Red Hat ecosystem is still a much better choice, mostly because in our experience it's the most reliable, the RHEL and clones are all exchangeable (so you're not locked into a single vendor) and all have professional support.

We run RHEL and Alma Linux on servers and workstations, and it has been rock solid.

But for client use, if you're on GWS then of ChromeOS Flex is probably the best choice for a client. We run it on laptops we converted from Windows 11 when we migrated away from MS, and it works great. And it's not just for browser work, for example our software developers all do their development work in the Crostini Linux VM inside ChromeOS, and we have other engineers running MatLab and other complex applications in it.

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tejanaqkilica@reddit

How do you get autopilot to work only 40% of the time? I can't remember last time we had an issue with it.

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DiligentPhotographer@reddit

Back in the old days, I had a strange AD issue that was affecting several of our sites and we were crippled. The MS Engineer stayed on the call until it was fixed, well past his shift time. They just got it done. That kind of thing made premier support worth it... Nowadays, better off just googling it and hoping it resolves itself.

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code_monkey_wrench@reddit

Those people are gone. They have been replaced.

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TheWandererWise@reddit

Can we start asking to bring that back? We as customers need to ask for it back in mass so Microsoft can be like f AI support. We just aren't bugging the big corps enough for them to care.

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NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit

not even replaced, whatever premier support existed was dumped and you're stuck with people who could give less a fuck about your business.

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ebayironman@reddit

Those people have been replaced, as well as all of the testers that used to test The patches before they were sent out to the world. QA testers seem to be a dying breed in most software development environments nowadays.

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gonyoda@reddit

Long gone. Some went back but they went to different departments. But back in 2010 Microsoft had a purge, and never recovered in terms of t1 support

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bjc1960@reddit

I left in Nov 2009 as our team's work was split. Our office got the feature pack work and Redmond got the new release. That, and real estate brokers showing the office to clients was a clue for some. The rest got left go a month later

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thisbenzenering@reddit

I was one of those guys, it was a great time to work at MS. They had little 7/11 mini mart setups everywhere. Coffee, tea, snacks and full coolers with all the coke products and next to it, all the Pepsi products. They knew you might get stuck on something that you couldn't get far away from sometimes. We'd even have a weekly meeting with beer, wine and booze. please only take two drinks back to your cube/office afterwards.

Then there was just me and my supervisor. And then it was just her and the team of support in another country. When they killed off all the domestic support, it was the end of that era of really making sure the customer was served

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ebayironman@reddit

I can remember going to the Redmond campus and seeing those kiosks, with snacks and drinks. And they were open to anybody that was allowed in the building. I remember TS2 seminars, where Microsoft would put together basically a convention to get Microsoft partners to come and share knowledge, get some swag and so on and so forth. That's all gone now...

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_-pablo-_@reddit

Those guys in support aren’t gone. They’re just not frontline folks you’d get anymore. If they’re competent, they’re up in the Tier 2-3 and are tied to one of the cloud workloads.

The on-prem stuff is fully overseas

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Glass_Call982@reddit

Anytime I've engaged 365 support it's always been someone overseas. Even when escalating. It was so bad that my org cancelled the EXO migration and stayed on prem.

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Sad-Ship@reddit

I too am nostalgic for the old premier support. Those folks were real techs.

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haklor@reddit

Premier got shifted to unified and PFE's became Cloud Solution Architects, who still were supposed to do the same thing but the incentive plans suddenly required driving Azure/M365 revenue directly, rather than CSAT scores and contract consumption/growth.

There are still a lot of great people around, especially in the Federal space, but yeah, it isn't the same support.

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jspears357@reddit

Way back, I called paid support using my personal credit card two times. Both times they had to write Hotfix and get it to me to apply, and they didn’t charge me. You got to talk directly to a developer that could patch the code.

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poorleno111@reddit

Those folk got outsourced and/or H1B’d. gg

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gonyoda@reddit

I worked with one of those AD MS engineers and he really was an all in kinda engineer like that. We didn't work together at Microsoft 🤣 this was in 2009-10 timeframe - worked with him for 5 years.

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jake04-20@reddit

On a Good Friday before Easter in my second year at my first "real IT" job, our AD environment went tits up. I tried to do the authoritative restore and it didn't work. In a bit of a panic and just wanting to fix the DC's before leaving town for the weekend, I reverted to the previous night's backups (I know now that was probably one of the last things I should have done). I phoned a colleague and he told me to bite the bullet and buy the $500 support session from MS. I did, and the guy was a wizard. Had us back up in running in short time, and followed up several times over the weekend to do health checks. He was super flexible with my travel schedule too. That was a godsend. I wonder what would happen if I found myself in a similar situation today.

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music2myear@reddit

The one big MS call I needed the first engineer had to hand me off when his shift was over, and then took the call back when his next shift started. Both were in Bangalore, and both were competent and I really appreciated that competence and dedication.

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Drakoolya@reddit

I just hate IT in general these days. Intune especially, Give me AD and SCCM all day. Atleast they did things I asked them to do with an extremely low failure rate.

Intune devs are out of touch with the real world and I hate them and their little fan boys that come to their rescue with some BS powershells scripts to make their crap work.

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zertoman@reddit

Your Autopilot works 40% of the time? Lucky.

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jsellens@reddit

Twenty five years to get from fanboy to hater? Either you're far more kind and forgiving than any human should be, or you've been deliberately shielding your eyes. Though perhaps you've been a fanboy of their predatory business practices, and weren't referring to the quality of the technology?

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jazzdrums1979@reddit

As an MSP we’re seeing more and more clients using the least amount of MSFT services and products to keep their users happy and get their work done.

A lot of start ups and early stage companies are willing to pay for a GWS standard license and then use Microsoft apps for business for desktop apps. It’s not my favorite to have a hybrid set up like this, but the email is service has way better up time, no outlook desktop client to constantly troubleshoot and works seamlessly on Macs they want to use.

I don’t think I will ever see a day where Microsoft is an afterthought, but the gap is definitely widening to when I started my career 26 years ago.

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Horsemeatburger@reddit

A lot of start ups and early stage companies are willing to pay for a GWS standard license and then use Microsoft apps for business for desktop apps.

Which essentially means giving up on the few strengths of the MS365 ecosystem while giving away many the things that make GWS great.

I have to keep myself together writing this, but if you're intent to continue with the clown show that is Windows and Microsoft Office then you might be better off sticking with MS365.

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Benificial-Cucumber@reddit

Yeah, as much as it pains me to say it, if you're centered around their core business apps then it's a lot less hassle to just full send on the Microsoft stack. It's almost an all-or-nothing deal.

Unfortunately I work for a company that gets free E3 licences under the MPN program. It's very difficult to say no to that, and once they have that foot in the door, it's increasingly harder to say no to stuff on top.

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manilove__frogs@reddit

We're E5 and in an industry with a lot of compliance and auditing.

Sentinel, Purview/Data sensitivity labels, PIM/PAM, DLP, etc... are all things we're required to have for compliance purposes and I shudder to think of what it would be like to manage half a dozen different tools for that sort of thing.

On top of that you get Intune, Conditional Access, Defender/EDR and Power Automate all built into 1, and all of the apps...as much as I hate Microsoft it's a no brainer. Nothing comes close.

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RikiWardOG@reddit

that's how we are. use Box for storage, basic apps are MS, and on google workspace. Okta for IdP. We also use AWS for our custom apps.

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jazzdrums1979@reddit

That’s a nice stack. We deploy a lot of Okta as well. We’re an Egnyte partner for the companies who want a different experience than what OD and SPO offer. We use AWS to host apps for data visualization and other scientific analysis.

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RikiWardOG@reddit

Funny, we use Egnyte for our sister company actually and honestly I like it a lot more because in Box you can't break inheritance which is really annoying.

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All_Things_MSP@reddit

One of the great things about Egnyte is how closely it resembles NTFS permissions. If anyone has any questions about Egnyte please feel free to DM me. Eric Anthony - Director - MSP Program - Egnyte

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delicate_elise@reddit

The ironic thing is Outlook Web and New Outlook work fine, but you get the people hating on it because it doesn't have 3 million features like Classic Outlook. Like okay... neither does G Suite? And people can send and read email just fine.

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GBICPancakes@reddit

Same here. A lot of my smaller clients, or new startup "5 people in a basement" companies are coming to me with "How can we do this with as little Microsoft as possible". Even to the point of reviewing what software apps they use.

Two weeks ago I had a client call me and say they wanted to cancel all their M365 licenses and remove Office completely from their systems (a blend of Mac and Windows) - I had to talk them down and was able to convince them to keep some licenses for core people who needed it.

I don't think MS is aware of how *angry* a lot of SMBs are about their behavior and recent offerings. There's real pain and real issues there, but also a serious PR problem.

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jazzdrums1979@reddit

Couldn’t agree more. It’s becoming harder and harder to convey the value to people. The way I see it, more companies are going to vote with their wallets. I wish the Adobe’s and Microsoft lots of luck in this ever changing landscape of technology. I feel like it could potentially be unrecognizable in the next decade.

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GBICPancakes@reddit

Yeah Adobe is another one people are pissed about, but they feel more trapped, since there really isn't as easy a replacement for the CC suite compared to Office or Exchange. Hell, the Adobe hate goes back decades :) Another is Intuit and their aggressive push to QBO.

I'm not ready yet to say "Year of Linux on the Desktop" or anything, but I am installing it on a number of older Win11-incompatible systems as simple stand-alone browser systems (along with ChromeOS Flex for google-ecosystem clients). And I'm seeing an uptick in Mac systems at the smaller SMBs as Zoomers enter the workforce and view Windows as a "legacy OS".

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Thunar13@reddit

Microsoft is full on vibe coding copilot into the OS. They’re using copilot to vibe code copilot into windows.

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cdoublejj@reddit

you misspelled "Microslop"

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bubblegoose@reddit

Or just make everything Microslop

https://github.com/4O4-wasd/Microslop

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scriptmonkey420@reddit

Reminds me of the "cloud" extension

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payterrrrrrrrr@reddit

please share and bless me with this knowledge

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edbods@reddit

i think it's the cloud to butt extension; changes every mention of cloud in context to computing to butt

https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

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standish_@reddit

The cloud is just someone else's fart, after all.

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RikiWardOG@reddit

lmfao the rare time I love the internet

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cdoublejj@reddit

warms my heart

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Thunar13@reddit

Wait but Microsoft explicitly told me not to use that word…

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Elensea@reddit

Autopilot has always worked from me but we buy direct from Dell and they load in the PCs to our domain.

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secret_configuration@reddit

Support has gone downhill significantly over the years. Quality of Windows updates has been a joke, with out of band updates now being released for....of band updates.

Copilot has been terrible as well. Lacks cohesion, too many disjointed or disconnected modules that are in various state of "preview".

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tacticalpotatopeeler@reddit

Which copilot are you referring to?

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Konowl@reddit

I’ve been a windows server/powershell for far too long. I now hate Microsoft almost as much as IBM. Moved all my home stuff to Mac.

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LastTechStanding@reddit

I get the frustration but this is all “too big to fail” companies at the moment. Fired all their talent, to have robots do the work. Now support is suffering; but don’t you worry! Their precious bottom line is still doing good!!

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slippery@reddit

Let the hate flow through you.

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RikiWardOG@reddit

100% agree. MS have fallen so incredibly far from their glory days of engineers that actually loved the work they were doing and products they were providing to vibe coding microslop for shareholders to suck the sole out of the company. Windows 11 drops inputs from they keyboard now, that's how bad it is. You think you're going crazy trying to paste shit when it never even copied it even after trying ctrl-c 5 fucking times. have to right-click copy half the time now.

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thecomputerguy7@reddit

I thought I might be going nuts with the whole copy/paste thing. I had no idea it was happening to other people too

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Ghawblin@reddit

Average Microslop support experience as a billion dollar org with thousands of staff

Experience an issue at 4pm with Azure, it's high priority. and you're powerless to fix it yourself because PaaS/PaaS
Submit a ticket
2am get a call from a Microslop support agent asking to join call. Ask if you can circle back at 6-7am when more engineers are working.
Microslop agent downgrades it to low priority
Try for 4 weeks to get an answer. The issue resolved itself after 2 days, but executive leadership wants answers. Talk to 17 different Microslop tier 1 support agents who ask for video evidence of a log that won't generate. The last 9 agents inform you that you submitted the ticket wrong and they can't see the original ticket, or the new tickets you made.
Eventually give up

I would rather have my nails ripped out than use the support I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

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FourtyMichaelMichael@reddit

Linux Mint

Brother.

How sad is it though that Linux is only picking up steam because Valve did some work, and MS is doing anti-work?

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Ghawblin@reddit

I used linux (Ubuntu) back in 2011-2014 because I was broke af and needed a laptop for college, found one without a harddrive, and slapped one in but didn't have money for a windows license.

It was good! Kinda sucked for most programs though.

Nearly 15 years later, and holy shit, I switched to Mint as a test, and next thing I knew it was 3 months later and I hadn't ONCE booted up my windows partition. Literally every single steam game works that I've tried. Discord and spotify are just web wrappers, and it's been great!

I even got my non-IT wife to use it, and she likes it too!

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FourtyMichaelMichael@reddit

Haha, almost same. I did Ubuntu back in 2008 and it literally scared me off of Linux for like 14 years! It was BAD. And that no one was honest about how bad it was for the normal consumer was a pretty typical "yes, this was made by autistic programmers I think".

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creenis_blinkum@reddit

You are a fucktard for not escalating to your account rep immediately. You are also a fucktard for refusing their support call at 2am if it was indeed a sev0 problem. You should have accepted the call and worked to fix it as they were doing when they reached out to you. No shit they lowered the priority; you refused their support.

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

Wow.

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catwiesel@reddit

microsoft works on the premise "everybodys last choice is good enough if its the only choice"

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NightFire45@reddit

It's the definition of enshitification. Why make better products when you can just crush competition? With the constant whining here clearly MS is still getting all this business with basic support.

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pdp10@reddit

Microsoft fanboy

What factors would you say led you to this?

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

I was a software engineer and I loved .net especially compared to what was available at the time. I still like .NET, despite Microsoft being actively hostile to its customers.

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pdp10@reddit

I'm relatively sympathetic to those that say .NET was a better Java, after Microsoft was legally prohibited from embracing and extending Java.

But on the other hand, Java in its heyday was mediocre and frustratingly slow. Microsoft drank their own flavor-aid and tried to use .NET to rewrite the Windows userland, and it ground Longhorn to a halt on the fastest machines. It was such a bad idea they kept at it for two decades, culminating with Electron running their own typed version of ECMAscript.

Ironically, Bill Gates originally swore never again to use runtime-VM languages for applications because the performance of Multiplan was panned. Further irony came from the fact that 1980s P-code was actually lightweight and fast compared to 2000s Java or .NET CLR. Fast enough for state of the art graphical games in the 1980s.

But in response to the lack of modern hardware making up for needlessly bloated software and the 8GiB Macbook Neo, there's some messaging that Microsoft may be going back to native compiled C/C++.

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indigo196@reddit

Apple is worse.

Go Linux.

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

Serious question, how is Apple worse?

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bjornabe@reddit

I have been a Microsoft devotee since Win 95 - Im a developer by trade but started my career in WinTel infrastructure.

This week I will finally be moving my daily driver over to Debian and a keeping Windows 11 dual boot just for the odd monthly 1 hour gaming session.

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cdoublejj@reddit

if it's not a multiplayer game with anti cheat most all my games work in steam proton, in fact some games that won't run on windows WILL run on proton! steam proton is just fancy wine for lack of better explanation. moved the whole family over a few years ago, grandma can't even tell the difference.

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Valdaraak@reddit

Even then many multiplayer games with anti-cheat will work. I've played Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals on Linux just fine. It's the kernel level anti-cheat that gets problematic.

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_haha_oh_wow_@reddit

Kernel level anticheat is inherently problematic on any OS, even when it's "working": I refuse to play any game that has it. I'm not letting these greedy scumbags rootkit my computer just so I can pay them money to play a game.

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Valdaraak@reddit

I agree. I've read enough reports from Call of Duty devs on how their anti-cheat operates to stay far away.

What's funny is that many of their anti-cheat tactics don't even need the rootkit because it's all just data. They have so many analytics, tracking, and metadata in their game sessions that they can literally rebuild a player's match from their perspective and everything they did in it.

And it's always analyzing that stuff and it'll do crazy shit in real time to suspected cheaters. My favorite is it'll take session data from another real player and create a hallucination that only the suspected cheater can see so that they literally chase ghosts.

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cdoublejj@reddit

sorry! i should have said KERNEL LEVEL anti cheat

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Centimane@reddit

It is still fair to say, if it has anti cheat it may not work on Linux. If they don't have a Linux version of their anti cheat it's a bust.

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_haha_oh_wow_@reddit

Most games run fine on Linux these days FYI. I game on Cinnamon Mint or Steam OS pretty much every day.

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Mr_ToDo@reddit

I'm not a hater so much as I don't want to pay ten times the value of ram/storage

I certainly prefer the OS that I know how to troubleshoot without sinking a ton of time into it, but what can you do. I just had to pick my poison and chose to use 'nix for at least the mid term

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scriptmonkey420@reddit

Most games work great on Linux now. I haven't used windows for my primary desktop if about 10 years.

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twotonsosalt@reddit

Why dual boot? Steam works fantastically on Linux and Lutris does an amazing job handling any non steam game. I moved off windows a year ago and haven’t looked back. The only real issue you’ll run into are games that require kernel level drm.

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Valdaraak@reddit

The only real issue you’ll run into are games that require kernel level drm.

And maybe their "odd monthly 1 hour gaming session" falls into that category.

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twotonsosalt@reddit

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. There are a few websites that list these games so he can find out.

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cdoublejj@reddit

LTT wan had a good discussion just recently about must have killer apps with anticheat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KwaXR-7fZE

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jakeod27@reddit

I think we can assume that the person saying dual boot knows what games work in Linux

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twotonsosalt@reddit

I think we both know what the word assume actually means. Never assume anything.

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eking85@reddit

As my middle school teacher put it

ass (u) me

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Specialist_Guard_330@reddit

Switch to Bazzite and never look back.

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CeC-P@reddit

"How can we make paid support incidents more efficient?" - Microsoft
"Make them run it through a third party middleman for no reason!" - Some other idiot at Microsoft

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Ive_seen_things_that@reddit

Autopilot is intended for entertainment purposes only. That's what they are now claiming anyway

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Calm_House8714@reddit

IDk, autopilot, remediations, Intune in general works really well for us. It took some time to get there, but generally with things configured correctly it works well. Only slightly frustrating things is waiting for devices to check in to take changes, but you can also set the check-in frequency yourself now and that has massively helped.

However, getting it to that point is a lot of trial and errors. A lot having to do with lack of control over the timing of things. But that existed with GPO as well, it's not an intune thing.

For instance: A lot of software needs registry keys set in the user hive. Which Intune can't do directly, so you do it via remediation script. However, if the keys are set before the software is installed, the installer sets them to default values. So, you need to write the detection script such that the software not being installed doesn't trigger the remediation, the software being installed and the correct registry values set doesn't trigger remediation and finally the software being installed without the correct registry values set does trigger the remediation.

I agree with the others posting that say you might just be in over your head. It's a learning curve, but it can and does work very well for a lot of Organizations. And I'd think it could for any organization that puts in the effort.

As far as getting your emails blocked for sending spam, it's probably a blanket policy that the block is for 24 hours. And it's a good thing they stick to that.

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

It was not spam. It was a failure in another system that caused it to send ourselves thousands of messages. I do not disagree with them having flagged it. I do disagree with their L1 and L2 being incompetent. The first two said it would auto-clear at midnight, then after 24 hrs. The third I talked to said she had to manually clear it.

How could I have done that differently?

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N7Valor@reddit

Only took me 4 years from using Microsoft first to using Arch Linux as my PC.

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corbeth@reddit

Listen, I’m not one to gag myself making Microsoft happy, but it sounds like you may be out of your depth with some systems that you don’t understand. Microsoft has plenty of stuff that is broken and they just don’t fix. Autopilot is almost entirely based on your configuration and your network. If it’s not working, there’s something wrong there. And email systems are a whole other thing. Getting a reputation hit like that isn’t something that Microsoft can solve for you overnight. They have to convince everyone you’re not a spammer, and there is a reason that there are systems set to do large sends like that.

My best advice is to find a good CSP, a good one will provide you will support for these kids if issues and can partner with you to help solve these issues. Plus they will likely help you save money on licensing along the way. If that’s a decision that you can make, I highly recommend it.

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SystemGardener@reddit

100% agreed. If OPs auto pilot is having that high of a failure rate it’s definitely something fucked on their end.

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

Look at other posts here. Maybe, if all you do is autopilot and you have 100k machines you’ll be fine. If autopilot is just 1% of your job, maybe it won’t work, and it may not be easy to find out why.

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UniqueSteve@reddit (OP)

I fully understand the email problem. Their support article goes through a checklist, which I did even though I knew the origin of the problem. At the end it says to contact Microsoft support for resolution, which I also did. Their L1 and L2 incorrectly told me I would just have to wait, first until midnight then 24 hrs after and there was nothing I would do. I submitted additional tickets after 30 hrs, they went through the checklist and reenabled the account in < 1hr.

How could I have done that differently?

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