One of the challenges I continually see in the Information Technology industry, is the “This does not work” statement by engineers asked to implement new solutions.

A few years ago (may age my self a bit on this one) I architected a Lync Pilot for a company that included voice\Telephony services as part of the solution. The consultant that went on site to implement called me about 4 hours into his day to tell me. The solution would not work as a telephony solution. This engineer had been to Lync training and knew it was a solution that should work. However, he was having some issues with the sip trunks. And after several hours of trouble shooting his answer was it would not work. This was stated in front of the customer.  

At this point I knew we had at least 4 pilots running with almost identical configurations in the field. After I presented the configurations and provided recommendations for improvements, the consultant was able to successfully implement the solution.  The damage caused the customer to lose trust in the solution.  

Role forward to a recent event around Microsoft High Volume Email (HVE) which is a solution that Microsoft has provided for High volume email inbound to your tenant as well as a temporary fix for Legacy authentication that will be turned off in sept. With HVE you can still use legacy authentication until 2028.

I provided the documentation to an engineer to set up HVE, and made sure his manager was aware of the solution. And what the planned use of it was. 2 weeks later when asking about the status of the project I was told it “Would not work” as we had to enable legacy auth for the entire environment. So, they had started testing Amazon SES. So, mail would flow from on prem to Amazone SES and then to Exchange online. VS On prem to Exchange online with HVE.

So, I collaborated with the engineer for about 4 hours and was able to get HVE fully working. With minimal effort.

But this made me wonder. How often does added complexity result from engineers struggling to make designs work?  Or did the pilot fail because the engineer could not get it to work. This happens more often than most people think.

·      Why do engineers not ask themselves “would Microsoft put out a solution that does not work” or any vendor for that matter?

·      How does that make the engineer\Consultant look when someone else can get it configured?

·      Does that mean the engineer\Consultant is bad at his job?

I hear Horror Stories around Products all the time. However I always wonder was it really the product? or is it the people implementing the solution?