Yesterday I called up Microsoft Support to discuss the calendaring sharing issue I am experiencing. At first I was directed to Exchange support. They quickly established that it wasn’t an exchange problem because the calendar sharing permissions work fine in OWA and Outlook 2010. So, they forwarded me to Outlook support (the next day, when Outlook support was open).
The lady that called me from Outlook support immediately began asking me questions about my exchange environment. When I got around to the fact that our exchange server was a VM using VMWare Server 2, she immediately started to back out of troubleshooting by saying that Exchange is supported in an virtual environment. She showed me a MS KnowledgeBase article that indicated the Exchange 2007 wasn’t supported in in virtual environments.
“But this is Exchange 2010”, I say. At which point she tried to tell me that they were practically the same thing and that the article also includes Exchange 2010. After I pointed out that the article is obviously very knowledgable in what it is referring to (it even points out the service packs that don’t support virtualization in exchange 2007), she put me on hold.
When she came back, she refered me to another KB article that indicated that virtualization partners, such as VMWare server, are responsible for testing Microsoft products in their virtual environments. It seems that she was trying to convince me that this article meant should couldn’t help me.
Finally, I told her that she was trying to avoid helping me by using a unique scenario like virtualization as an excuse. Further-more, I told her that she is Outlook support and that Exchange support has claimed that this problems is not related to Exchange; it is related to outlook.
“Therefore, you should be able to help me.”
After a big sigh, she put me on hold, again and came back willing to help debug the issue. I win