Bad Timing

I have gone back-and-forth on whether to write this or not. If I stick with this, it is going to be a lengthy post. And in the SaaS world we live in, by the time I post this some of the proceeding issues / pain-points could no longer exist. But yesterday Microsoft placed a proverbial straw on the camel’s back for me, and it made me want to commit to writing this. I found out yesterday that Microsoft enabled a service in the GCC, advertised as much, but because of a lack of a dedicated GOV SKU gave customers no way of using the service. A service was available for five¬ months without a way for anyone to purchase it.

It was something that just set me off and made me want to highlight a growing trend in the GCC, a complete lack of quality control in many product and feature releases.

Some Context

Firstly, for those who may now know what I am referring to when I use the acronym “GCC”, I am referring to the Government Community Cloud. The TL; DR version is that it is a separate, sovereign cloud instance of Microsoft 365 that meets the needs of some government agencies, their contractors, etc.

GCC is a bit different from more secure government clouds (like GCC High and GCC DOD) since it was created years ago (around 2014) and actually leverages some commercial components (like Azure AD). This could be part of the issue with the GCC, but I would expect Microsoft to have solved this issue over the course of 7-8 years, so I am not giving them a pass.

Quality Control Tip of the Iceberg

I can assure you that this is the tip of the iceberg, but here are a few examples of what we’ve had to deal with in the GCC:

FindTime’s Disappearing Act

Our users loved this one. We have been leaning on FindTime for a few years now. It’s a great service that cuts down on the back-and-forth of trying to find shared time to meet with a group of users. Unexpectedly a few months ago though, the product completely disappeared. No warning, no messages short of the product page being updated to reflect that it was not supported in the GCC.

Our users were furious (as they should have been), and no workaround was provided. Our Premiere Support resources pointed us to a Message Center article (thanks), and we were left in the dark until a roadmap item alerted us to GCC availability coming in eight months.

Thankfully, the feature just came back after about 3 months of being gone, but this was still inexcusable.

To-Do Mobile is AWOL

According to the roadmap. this item is due out next month. I am not holding my breath on this one though. This is a feature that has been promised multiple times to us from the product team, only for this date to continue to slip.

Tasks in Teams

Available in GCC!! Just kidding. We still have the old Planner app.

Webinars in Teams

Mixed messages on these roadmap items, but it’s almost insinuated that Webinars should be available in GCC. Nope.

Fluid / Loop Components in Teams Chat

According to the roadmap (AKA the holy grail of product release windows), the GCC should have Fluid / Loop components in Teams chat already! Oh wait… we don’t. We saw them on our mobile apps for about six hours, but then they disappeared, never to be seen again.

Microsoft Whiteboard

This one hurts _ a lot_. Before the pandemic hit, as Microsoft was making tweaks to how the Whiteboard service was architected, they completely blocked the whiteboard app from functioning with GCC accounts. This came without warning and without any work around. We ended up waiting for two years for a solution to come to the GCC. And to top it off, when it did¬ finally arrive in the GCC, the client application release schedule was pulled back and still is not available.

Shared Whiteboard in Teams Room Systems

With the new Whiteboard experience lit up in tenants, Microsoft made a change to the Teams client within Teams Room systems to support viewing shared whiteboards. It took weeks of troubleshooting with Microsoft to identity an issue with the licensing in GCC clients that prevented shared whiteboards from rendering on these endpoints.

Shared Whiteboard on Surface Hub

There was a recent article about updating whiteboard experience coming to Surface Hubs. Unfortunately, Microsoft cannot even confirm for me whether GCC will be included in this release. Radio silence…

Guest Join on Surface Hub

Surface Hubs were supposed to support guest join for WebEx and Zoom calls (like Microsoft Teams Room systems do). This was advertised and has yet to be delivered.

Outlook Add-In Management

Microsoft transitioned customers to the Admin Center for add-in management well over a year ago. Somehow though, no one on the Microsoft side of the house thought to test how that would work in the GCC, and it completely broke the ability for our users to manage add-ins themselves.

Creating Tasks from Team Messages

For a good two months, whenever you wanted to create a Planner task from a message in Teams chat, a blank modal would pop-up. We didn’t have any users complain, nor did I have the time to submit a ticket to Microsoft and spend hours pulling together the applicable resources for troubleshooting. How does a feature like this get released without any testing?

Project on the Web

Another product that kept slipping and slipping and slipping. Delivery dates according to the roadmap and MC would come and go without a whisper, only to be corrected weeks later. We finally got though… terrible licensing model and all!

Visualize Lists using Power BI

We just got this slick new feature. Attempting to use it however renders a “Something went wrong” error. “You don’t have permission to view the data in this list. Please reach out to the owners of the list to get access. Well… I am a Site Collection Administrator, so I’m pretty sure I have access. On top of this I have a Power BI Pro license. SMH.

Manage (but not really) Surface Hubs via the Teams Admin Center

In our Teams Admin Center, we have a nice, dedicated section for viewing all our production Surface Hubs. The link works great, it just renders a blank table. Had to reach back to our Surface Hub rep to get confirmation that – indeed – this is not supported for a few month months in the GCC.

Other Miscellaneous QC-related Issues:

• Inconsistent Message Center Notices: We are now working through expiring Teams meeting recordings because we enabled a policy when one MC article said we had to, but it turns out the feature is not even available in GCC tenants yet. #confused
• Reply to a specific message in the Teams desktop client = no where to be found in GCC.
• Share to Channel from Outlook – communicated as available to GCC customers but turned out to be unsupported due to compliance reasons.
• Org-wide Teams – you will not find this documented anywhere, but this is not supported in the GCC. We had the Product Manager ask us “do you really¬ need it?”. God forbid we want to use a feature that you have developed due to a demand.
• Teams on CarPlay: Roadmap item calls out GCC (even GCC High and DoD), but this does not work.
• A multitude of other capabilities tagged on the public roadmap as being included in GCC that turn out are not, only to be followed with a dedicated roadmap item with a delivery date of later in the year (or further).

Disclaimer

By the time I finish this post, some of these issues may be resolved. Also, it is worth noting that while telling the Microsoft 365 story in the context of a GCC tenant means there are holes in the story, the entirety of the suite is in a state that can still drive substantial change within an organization looking to embrace a modern workplace.

Anything to Add?

If you are a GCC customer and have anything to add, please reach out!