Vista - Update on Windows Live FolderShare

Dear FolderShare Community

On behalf of all of the folks at Microsoft who work on FolderShare, we want
to apologize for the problems many of you have been facing with the service
over the past several days. I can’t live without the service, myself -- and
understand how difficult it can be when things don’t work properly. In the
spirit of being open with the community, we want to fill you in one what’s
going on with FolderShare.

First, I want to stress that we care about FolderShare and Microsoft is
committed to supporting FolderShare, fixing the current problems, and making
significant improvements in the months ahead.

We’re hard at work on improvements to the service, including some great new
UI enhancements you can expect to see in the coming months that we think
you’re going to love.

In the meantime, however, we’ve been facing some challenges as we begin to
transition the platform behind the service from the original code FolderShare
ran on when we first acquired it to a more robust offering. And
unfortunately many of you have been feeling some of these pains first hand.

Specifically, some recent hardware failures caused a chain of events that
have caused connection issues for many over the last week or so. We are
working hard to address these problems and expect things to be functioning
properly again in the coming days. And longer term, you can rest assured
that we are also making significant investments in our architecture and
platform to fix these issues for the long term and to prepare the service for
the future.

In the weeks ahead, it is possible that there may be a few additional bumps
on the road as we get to a more stable situation. I can personally assure
you that we are taking this very seriously and will be in communication
throughout to help prepare you for any issues before they happen whenever
possible.

Again, we apologize for the recent problems and appreciate your patience as
we fix these and get the service ready for great things ahead. Please bear
with us. We believe it will be worth your while.

Thank-you
Mohammed and the FolderShare Team

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:39:00 -0800, Mohammed Samji [MSFT]
<MohammedSamjiMSFT@xxxxxx> wrote:
Many thanks for the update and for your efforts in wrestling with the
snakes for us. I'm relieved to know that the folks at FS really do
understand that the system is not running at ~92% of anything meaningful.

Tony

> Again, we apologize for the recent problems and appreciate your patienceThanks Mohammad for this update. When you expect an outage could you please
announce it in advance or at least as soon as it happens here and even
better on the main login page? Either/or would be good; both would be
better.

Thank you Mohammed and FS team for the update.

Dan


"Mohammed Samji [MSFT]" wrote:

Could have really used a "heads up" to know there were internal demons. i
wrestled with the log-in for soooooo long. Results were really confusing , I
felt like a rat in a Skinner box.
A post that files configuration is taking place and the system may be
unstable would have REALLY HELPED!
keep us posted.... you have our e-mail address.

thanks

Thanks for the saying something. I was encourage when I first read your
update but now I realize that the update did not really give us a good handle
on what the current situation is.

Can you be more specific about "expect things to be functioning
properly again in the coming days." A few days ago it was more like you
expected things to be functioning properly in a few hours.

Are we just waiting for the system to catch up now? If so what percent of
users are now connected and what is the rate if connection increase or
decreas? If were not just playing catch-up what is the main problem? Is the
hardware ok? Is there just too much volume?

Do you possibly have a way to cycle through all users and only let a small
number of users connect at a time so that atleast everyone gets on for some
time during the day? Half the users for two hours and the other half for two
hours then back to the first half. I'm sure the system was not designed for
this but maybe it is possible.

Please think creativley and give us more details.

Andrew

Thanks for the info Mohammed
Could you please when making your improvements add some form of service status
report. This would enable us to quickly establish where a connection problem
lies, if we know its a problem at your end it would save alot of frustration
try it figure out what is wrong with our set up.

Thank You
PS its a great programme glad to hear your commitment to keep it running and
continued improvement

"Mohammed Samji [MSFT]" wrote:

I would like to echo the sentiments of others that have expressed their
thanks at this update. While I am not pleased that things are not working, it
is gratifying hear from someone behind the scenes that is jeeping us updated.

I use this service to keep several of my offices in Europe and the US
connected so for me it is particularly important that the service continues
to exist, and functions properly. Quite literally, my business depends on it
and I would not be able to operate remote offices the way I do without this
service.

Before it was acquired by MS, I was a paying customer of the service and I
would have no objections to being one again, if paying for the service would
give me access to greater reliability and higher limits in terms of #s of
files and #s of libararies, where the former is more important to me than the
latter.

Thanks again for your feedback. Regards, Stephan in San Francisco


"Mohammed Samji [MSFT]" wrote:

Hi FS-team,

Thanks for the update, but since you have all our e-mailaddresses I would
have liked to be informed by e-mail. I also was very confused the last couple
of days and have lost some work, or it is inaccessible by me at the moment.
If I knew the service was unstable, I could have made precautions (like
saving and transfering data on a USB-stick).

However, I really appreciate your work on it and hope to see the service up
and running in the very near future!

Thanks,
Peter.

"Mohammed Samji [MSFT]" wrote:

While I am glad to hear someone is working on the problem it seems like it is
taking an awful long time to fix. It would have been nice to have gotten
some kind of notice over the weekend when things were down. You have
everyone's email, wouldn't it be possible to have emailed everyone with an
update?

That being said, I am still having trouble connecting and staying connected.
This is creating a headache for my work. At this point in time I am very
dissatisfied with Foldershare and will be looking at other file sharing
options such as BeInSync. I cannot continue to work this way with the
program only working half-assed.