Michael J. Swart

So I’ve been using Microsoft connect for SQL Suggestions and the response so far for my three issues is:

• Call MS support for that problem
• Defer your request.
• No comment

I wanted to see what other peoples’ experiences were and so I took a very quick survey for bugs and suggestions submitted on some random days older than a week (May 1 and May 2) to be exact. Here are the results of my survey

• no comment yet (6 issues)
• active dialogue waiting on MS (4 issues)
• active dialogue waiting on submitter (4 issues)
• already fixed in existing release (2 issues)
• by design or won’t fix (8 issues)
• to be considered for a later release(4 issues)
• fixed for next release (4 issues)

So how does MS come out at the end of this? Quite well I think, they’re getting a lot of valuable feedback. How do customers come out at the end of this? So-so. I think MS could do better. The first two categories of issues describe issues that seem orphaned. That’s 10 issues out of 32. If MS had a better track record than that, connect.microsoft.com would be seen as a real place to be heard. That would encourage even more feedback.

Another thing that I hope MS is doing is to place a larger weight on feedback that would help improve scalability/performance. This is because if there is feedback that could help MS become a better Enterprise-level platform, then this feedback would be fairly sparse compared to the other feedback requests that deal with UI improvements say. My guess is that if the SQL Server team spends time on enterprise-level improvements, the ROI would be at least as great as UI improvements.