Microsoft “upgraded” their licensing site and in the process managed to break the functionality that allows you to request access back to the licenses that you could see before the upgrade. After wasting an hour trying to obtain our licenses online and 2 hours on the phone to try and speak to someone I eventually twittered my frustration and got a message back from Microsoft_VLSC to say they were aware of the problem and offered some help. I’m currently still without access to my agreements but at least I now know someone is aware of my issue and is looking into the situation.
A note on the front page of the licensing portal would have saved lots of people a lot of time and a lot of frustration (and also saved the poor twitterer from having to message everyone who was having a problem).
To make matters worse when we called up on Tuesday night to activate a Windows 2003 server we were told the product activation systems were also unavailable. Interestingly this happened on Patch Tuesday, after a zero day exploit and I know that Microsoft were hit internally by slammer when that was launched, so the conspiracy theorist in me wonders……. If it’s not a worm, you’d have thought that Microsoft would be able to cluster together a couple of servers so their product activation system would stay up and allow customers to obtain a key so they could access the servers after product activation had crippled the server that the customer had paid for.
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I started waiting on Tuesday 12/8 to add a purchased license under my account by “requesting permission” through this new Volume Licensing Service Center interface; however, it would not accept my license number though it was accurately copy and pasted multiple times. Much time wasted on India phone support from the VL Team. Also spoke to someone from another team who confirmed this was a known chronic problem. As far as I am aware it is still broken as of now 12/12 noon -5 GMT.
Yes I too find it frustrating that a technical company such as Microsoft doesn’t know how to post a simply message on their landing page informing people that they are having problems and are aware of the problem …check back later …etc. Their professionalism and thorough communication is grossly lacking.
Actually I’m still waiting to activate an MSDN license I purchased in Novemeber to renew my subscription ending 11/30, in the mean time my subscription has lapsed. I’ve called MS VLSC because the new agreement still won’t show up in the new site, and adding it generates errors. I’ve been calling every day, and waiting on hold for about an hour each time. They’ve escalated the case, and I’m still waiting because there’s no word back from the escalation team. In the mean time I can’t access my MSDN for the last month. I’ve called CDW multiple times, and there doesn’t appear anything they can do from their end.
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DM the VLSC team at with your details – they should be able to help – they were a lot more efficient than waiting hours on hold.