By Roni Burd, OLW Program Manager
I know how frustrating it is to have a bug and wait until something is done about it. As a user a couple of months back, I recall thinking: “Gosh, can’t they just fix this?!?” Well, if you’ve worked in the software industry you know that maintenance is a big challenge, and we are no stranger to that problem. We do our best and we work very hard to get all those bugs out before we ship, but sometimes we miss a case or two.
Occasionally, we find bugs that only one or two users are experiencing and those are very difficult to replicate. For example, the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to help a user who is having a problem with sharing. This is the only such case that has been reported to us on the subject of sharing a single file, and we have not yet been able to pinpoint it but we will keep trying! When you submit bugs to us, it helps to know exactly what steps you took to get there. If the problem is very subtle and depends on specific conditions, it is nearly impossible to replicate it in our testing environments. Since we will never have access to your workspace, we can only simulate the conditions in the hope of seeing the same behavior and fixing it. This is why it is sometimes hard to do the “just fix it” thing (and we thank you for your patience in those cases).
So if you find bugs, please let us know. As I said in my previous blog entry, we do listen a lot and having more cases helps us figure out the patterns that trigger issues and, ultimately, that makes Office Live Workspace a better product for your everyday use.
Roni Burd, OLW Program Manager