Gentlemen, Start Your Engines…

And stall!

Yep, that’s the best way to describe how our migration is going: we were completely dead in the water for a few days… amazing isn’t it?

Last week, we got access to our Microsoft Online account and our consulting team started to dig into the configuration of our Office 365 account.

On my side, I created another virtual machine for the Windows Active Directory Federation Services component (more info on ADFS here).

What Happened?

Late Friday afternoon, while the consultants were configuring ADFS… something went wrong. So wrong in fact that we just couldn’t log back into our Microsoft Online Portal. None of our administrative user accounts worked anymore and we are basically “locked-out” of our own house.

On Monday (i.e. yesterday), we called up Microsoft… what followed was a nice example of bad customer service and, at the end of the day… we were still locked out.

So, What’s The Solution To Get Access Back?

After 2 calls with Microsoft, the only solution that Microsoft said they could “try” on our account was to “break the federation” on our Office 365 domain.

That required the authorization from our technical account manager, i.e. my manager, Mr. Patrick Darke.

The kicker here is that Microsoft sent the authorization request to the wrong email address for Patrick… isn’t this great? So we lost another couple of hours wondering why he had not received the email and had to call back to ask which email address they had used… not great.

We Got Access Back…

Yes, we got our access back a few minutes ago… it *only took* 4 calls on my side and a few calls from the consulting team as well… but at least we got access back to our account. That’s good right?

Basically, getting this “issue” resolved only took a “short” 27 hours…

Now, I just hope that once we have users on this nothing breaks!

Conclusion?

I don’t have much to say so far… except “please wish me luck”: I think I’ll need it!

Thanks for reading!

Marc