Ask HN: How do people use Microsoft services in 2022?

2 points

4 years ago

So classic "Cannot talk to a human" rant, but made me wonder if I'm doing something wrong. I mainly use AWS which is far from perfect, but usually I can get it to do what I want. I've spent a very frustrating 2 days trying to get Microsoft to work and can't.

Context: trying to do something super basic with the Microsoft Graph API -- retrieve calendar events for a specific user via a custom app.

I thought I could sign up, get an API key, and make a call.

There's a nice guide here[0] that shows how to do this.

But microsoft has a _lot_ of moving parts. I have an Azure account with an active subscription, so I go through the steps and everything seems to work, but I get 401 unauthorized errors when actually trying to retrieve the events. I spend a few hours messing around with different user/admin-level permissions but nothing helps.

Eventually I notice that the first step of the tutorial specifies that a pre-requisite is global admin access to a tenant. I thought I had that through Azure, but maybe I don't? The link directs to Microsoft 365 Developer program, which asks me to create a sandbox account. It then rejects all my phone numbers. [1]

I try to go to the support page, which needs me to sign in. I get a server error when trying to sign in [1].

I eventually contact Azure support, who say they have no view of Microsoft 365 and can't help at all (though it takes 2 hours of filling in a form and going through L1 support script on live chat to get to this point).

a) can anyone sign up for 365 developers [2] or is it b0rked for everyone?

b) can anyone sign into services hub [3] or is it b0rked for everyone?

c) it is normal that I need to deal with so many accounts and organizations to do something so simple?

To wit: I need an Azure account with active subscription, I need an Active Directory account to create the app, I need a 365 Developer account to get a sandbox, and I need a Support Account to get help. And internally, none of these orgs can talk to each other to figure out why I can't programmatically read events from Outlook.

How does anyone actually working with this stuff professionally ever get anything done?

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/msgraph-access-user-events/1-introduction

[1] https://i.ritzastatic.com/images/55e8b6a2c48a43afb08dd31c3c4c4035/micsup.png

[2] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program?ocid=MSlearn&WT.mc_id=m365-16105-cxa

[3] https://serviceshub.microsoft.com/home

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