Dave Beauvais’ Web Site

It seems only fair that since I bitched about 4SmartPhone’s Exchange server being down that I should post that it’s back up. Mostly. The server is back, new mail is being delivered, but nobody has any of their old content; no e-mails, no calendar, no tasks, no rules… nothing except any new messages that arrived after the server came back up. They say they’ll be restoring everything from backup over the next day or two. It’ll be interesting to see whether my PDA, which has data from before the crash “just works” or if I’ll end up with hundreds of duplicated appointments and contacts after the mailbox is restored from backup.

I want to thank the techs and server admins who must have had a really crappy weekend. I know this kind of thing sucks and it’s what all of us in IT dread the most. (Even more than meetings with our pointy-haired boss.) Thanks for your hard work!

So I’m happy the service is back, but I stand by my original complaint: they should have at least updated their Web site to let their customers know what was going on. Since they weren’t responding to e-mails or phone calls, they should have communicated something via their Web site. The free month of service is certainly appreciated, however, and I’m excited to see they are going to be moving to Exchange 2007. I hope this will be the last major unplanned service outage.

Here is the e-mail that was waiting for me when I logged in:

Dear 4SmartPhone Customer,

Over the past two days we have experienced a rather serious crash on one of our Exchange Servers.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this problem has caused you, but we are pleased to report that we have fixed the problem and taken all steps to ensure it will not happen again. Here are some things you will notice in the next few days:

1. Although it is now possible to connect to your mailbox again, it will only contain your new emails.
2. You can now send and receive emails.
3. Within the next few days, we will bring all original emails back on the Server.
4. Pro & Enterprise Clients can use their local copy in Offline Mode, and you must switch to connected mode to send & receive email. We will send a link to help you understand in a following email.
5. In addition, we are taking the following steps concerning the current Exchange 2003 servers: 4SmartPhone is rolling out more reliable Exchange 2007 on a brand new architecture; The fact that Exchange 2007 is more robust and combined with the new architecture, any failure are less likely, simpler and faster to recover from should we have to.

4SmartPhone sincerely appreciates your business. To demontrate [sic] our appreciation, your patronage, patience and trust in our service, we would like to extend a free month’s service to you. We will automatically add the free month onto your contract. If you have any additional questions, please email us at support@4smartphone.net ,

Thank you.

4SmartPhone IT staff.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 01:31 and is filed under PCs, Pocket PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.