Category: Google

Helping another company’s customers: Google Apps Help Forums

Posted by Martyn Drake – September 1, 2010

I have decided to once again join the Google Apps forums and do a bit of astro-turfing. What this means is that I help people with their Google Apps issues, but mention my employers and what we do on my profile page – so if anybody is curious to know what I am and what I do, it may help generate a bit of business. Hopefully the quality of my responses will convince people to come over to Memset. Not sure whether that’s helped, but looking at the stats for this blog, there are a number of curious people.

Within the past two and a bit weeks I’ve gone from level 1 through to level 6. I was at level 11 before I originally left the Power Posters/Top Contributors program and before I deleted my original Google Account to try and resolve an issue with Google Accounts/Google Apps and Docs. Which turns out was an unpublished known issue and I hadn’t had needed to delete my account at all. Sigh.

I forgotten that I used to enjoy helping out on the forums. It helps concentrate one’s mind on the task, and I think helps when I deal with my own customers. Also, it’s quite exciting (sad, I know) watching that little blue bar increase with every few posts – edging you ever closer to the next level (and with it, particular privileges). The are a number of downsides at the moment, and I’ve listed them below.

Biggest frustrations:

  • Not being able to escalate issues to Google.
  • Still too many problems with stuck verification processes. This has been ongoing for months and months and months. This requires escalation. I can do nothing to help.
  • Not all help articles can be referenced via the references section by article number.
  • Domain registration pending problems.
  • Blogger domain registrations. That really gets on my nerves. Needs far better procedures to domain registration and management if you’re likely to only ever use Blogger. Blogger people are posting on Google Apps forums. If they post to Blogger forums, they get redirect back to Google Apps. Nice.
  • Google hides their only-if-things-really-break contact forms for the Standard Edition when people need to get them, and finding them without bookmarking it is a complete pain in the arse.

    I very much doubt I will be invited back to the Power Posters/Top Contributors program again (what I like to think what I’m doing at the moment is penance for leaving in the first place), but if not, I would have to consider stopping helping out due to the lack of ability to escalate and be aware of problems that may not necessarily be known to the general public. Google is, and always will be, not a terribly good customer facing company. There is a good point that I could make regarding this, but I suspect my NDA would not allow me to mention it. Google is far better at innovating and developing products then they are dealing with existing customers. It is vital, then, that they have volunteers on the forums to bridge that gap. I did note that somebody at Level 4 was immediately converted to Top Contributor/Power Poster status recently. Who knows?

    So should I continue helping out? I think so – at least for the time being. But I don’t know when I’ll get bored or fed-up with the lack of not being able to do anything useful due to lack of tools.

    Speaking of lack of decent human contact – 32 days without Postini problem being resolved. No contact from Postini. I’m now intending on bringing this issue up with UK trading standards, through Google’s London office. Will still be writing to head office in Mountain View about this separately, mind. I love Google, but I wish they’d stop buying companies for a while and spend that $100 million or so improving the support infrastructure. If Google want people to trust them with all the things they’ve said about cloud infrastructures, they’re going to need to back that up with good solid, quick, support.

    That said, Google appear to be moving much more to Microsoft-style reseller program. It make sense – as a reseller you can do a bit more than what direct support can do. For example, one can cancel a trial in mid-test and convert to the paid product. Resellers can deal directly with accounts quickly and easily, and may even be able to fix problems over the weekend when I haven’t been able to do so with direct support. But then again, I’d hate Google to turn into another Microsoft – a company that seemingly distances itself from it’s customers (since when have you been able to get support for your copy of Windows directly from Microsoft?)

    • When Google Apps Sync for Outlook goes wonky.. here’s the solution

    Posted by Martyn Drake – August 29, 2010

    I recently gave Google Apps Sync for Outlook a go – in order to determine whether somebody was having problems with Outlook or Google Apps. I ran it with Outlook 2010 and was very impressed with the program indeed. One complaint from the user was that Google Apps Sync creates a new Outlook profile which is not what they wanted. But I can completely understand why Google Apps Sync does this. And it’s not as though it doesn’t migrate the data in the existing Outlook profile – it give you the option to migrate all the data across, and it does the very well.

    The problem I had was clearing out Google Apps Sync afterwards. I only use Outlook 2010 for testing purposes for the most part these days (until Microsoft ever decides to get around to implement a sane reply quoting system and one that doesn’t top post to boot) so I ununstalled Google Apps Sync and deleted the profile it had created. I was hoping to then switch the profile back to the default profile called “Outlook” but I couldn’t. Starting Outlook 2010 got me a “Can’t Start Microsoft Outlook” message, and attempting to fire up the Mail (32-bit) control panel application told me that I had no free system resources to do so. Uninstalling Office 2010, rebooting, re-installing, and tinkering with Windows registry would not get it working again.

    Until I saw this Help Article on the Google Help Forums.

    The instructions given by Jeffrey Roberson were spot on:

    * Shutdown the computer and restart in safe mode
    * Login as the user with the problem
    * Launch the Mail control panel by hitting Win-R and typing in: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL”
    * Delete all of the profile configuration so that it is blank
    * Reboot
    * Launch the Mail control panel as normal and setup the profile again.
    * Launch Outlook.

    (Note for Windows 7 64-bit users, the path to the control panel is has the (x86) in Program Files)

    I don’t believe this is entirely Google’s fault, but rather mostly Microsoft’s for making data recovery a complete pain in the arse. No application should have to force you to go into Safe Mode of your operating system to fix this.

    Free your email – don’t use ISPs freebie email addresses!

    Posted by Martyn Drake – August 27, 2010

    I’m beginning to see a rather large number of posts on the Google Apps Help Forums from customers of Virgin Media (with ntlworld.com email addresses) asking for help regarding their ntlworld.com email addresses. I’d quite forgotten that Virgin Media had recently migrated over to Google Apps Partner Edition and, like Sky before it (and during my short tenure with Sky Broadband at that), caused many customers to jump up and down in frustration over the migration process.

    Now customers (some have cancelled their broadband, others I don’t know – it’s not mentioned) are complaining that their accounts have been disabled. I would have thought that if you’ve cancelled your Virgin Media broadband account you’d expect to lose your associated ISP branded email too. After all, the ISP has no obligation to supply your with any associated free service now that you’re not paying them.

    This is why I always recommend to people to consider buying their own domain name and then either taking out web hosting somewhere that can provide email accounts with it, or specific email-only hosting. Google Apps (despite my grumblings here, and only then it’s really only related to Postini these days) is still a very good option – providing you (via the free edition) with up to 50 free user accounts/email addresses and using the fantastic Gmail interface. You can use Outlook, Windows Live Mail or any other IMAP or POP3 client if you wish. No more being tied to any ISP.

    The downside is that you’d have to tinker about with DNS settings – MX records and CNAMEs. But this isn’t too difficult and you’d always be able to find somebody to help you. A lot of domain registrars have specific Google Apps DNS wizards to help you configure for Google and an external web host. Heck, I’d even be able to help you get set-up on Google Apps on a strictly non-commercial basis (and out of hours – if you want me to help you with Google Apps during the day and on a commercial basis, you can get hold of me at Memset and I’m sure we’d be able to arrange the set-up work on a contractual basis).

    You could use the non-Google Apps Gmail service which is, my opinion, the best non-personal domain free email account. But I’d like having my own domain – it’s personal, portable (if you were to ever get fed-up of the non-domain Gmail.com account, you can’t port your email address to another service provider) and not at all expensive.

    So ditch the ISP freebie email – and just set your email free.

    26th days without Postini assistance .. letter to be sent to Mountain View

    Posted by Martyn Drake – August 26, 2010

    Given that it’s like getting pigs to tap dance, I’ve decided that Google really does need to hear how absolutely crap their Postini team is at turning around support tickets. Perhaps they already know, but hopefully the first in a campaign to try and get Google to publicly admit there is a problem is by writing to the Google Apps Product Manager (CC’ing the Postini Product Manager) and asking them why there appears to be such a backlog in responding to support tickets, and why new submissions via the official support form do not immediately return an email with a case query (unlike general Google Enterprise Support tickets which do).

    Postini is provided with Google Apps therefore one would expect the same level of support (critical or otherwise) as Google Apps. Except you’re not getting anywhere near the generally (with one or two exceptions) excellent levels provided by the Google Apps team itself.

    The next step, should a response not be forthcoming within 28 days of my letter being received by Google, will be to write to the computing press.

    Help! I’ve violated my own copyright – terminate me immediately!

    Posted by Martyn Drake – August 23, 2010

    Apparently I’ve been told that I had to submit a copyright notice against myself for my old orphaned YouTube account in order for my videos (and old account) to be deleted. Having just received what I assume is a human response asking for more information on my copyright claim, I’ve written a couple of paragraphs explaining the whole situation. I’m hoping somebody at YouTube/Google can do the right thing without terminating both my YouTube accounts and causing an even bigger mess.

    Oh Lordy – why did Google make all this so unnecessarily bloody complicated?

    Bring back the days of VHS, I say. It was nice a simple. Until you had to program the blasted video recorder, that’s when you ran into problems..

    YouTube recommends myself as a friend..

    Posted by Martyn Drake – August 21, 2010

    Google’s Google Account policies continue to grind on my nerves. When I deleted my ~3 year old Google Account to see if it would fix a problem relating to Google Apps/Google Docs sign-in issues[*], I thought Google would wipe all data associated with my Account. Turns out it does and it doesn’t. One thing I should have done, apparently is delete my YouTube account first prior to deleting my Google Account.

    Look – I don’t want to visit each and every bloody Google application if I am deleting one big overall account where my data is associated with, to be told that I need to delete each application individually. Deleting a Google Account should do what it says on the tin – delete the account and all data associated with it.

    Anyway..

    I’ve now found out my old YouTube account cannot be re-linked to the re-created Google Account. As such, I have an orphaned account at http://www.youtube.com/user/mbdrake. It can’t be deleted or re-linked. I wonder, Google, how long are you going to keep those videos, or can I request for them to be deleted? If so, how? Do I send a DCMA take-down notice against myself via YouTube? ;)

    But this greatly amused me:



    Click to enlarge

    So YouTube is now recommend me to myself as somebody I might know. Freud would have a field day with that.

    And back to Postini (still haven’t actioned what I’ve asked them to do), I’ve received this response which makes me question whether they’re paying attention or could even be bothered to check their ticket system:

    If your request is to cancel the Postini account for your Google Apps account (drake.org.uk), and you will not need to re-activate Postini account again, the cancellation work has been completed.

    > I’ve now disabled Postini again.

    This action will remove Postini link from your Google Apps Dashboard, so you must have stop seeing the error.

    I asked them to cancel the account so I can re-enable the Postini service within my Google Apps account. I’ve asked them in multiple tickets and by phone. If they can’t understand that, what does it take to make them understand? I stick by what I’ve said: is Postini REALLY Enterprise level mail security?

    The past two months have been the worst possible experience with Google since I first started using them since Google first started offering it’s services publicly. I only hope things pick up, otherwise I really will have to stick with plan B. I’ve always praised Google and thought good things of them up until June/July, but all I’m now seeing is bugs, lack of action and general sloppiness. Please do not turn into the Microsoft of old, mark II.

    [*]which ultimately it didn’t – and was told later it was a known issue which isn’t listed on the Help pages Known Issue list – fat lot of good that did me at the time, Google. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle by not deleting it.