SharePoint Joel lays out “7 Things You Should Do Before You Escalate to Microsoft Support” in order to save yourself some time, money, and headache.

We had a meeting today to discuss what we should do prior to escalating a ticket to Microsoft. There’s obviously a lot of troubleshooting that Tier 2, Tier 3, and Engineering should do prior to an escalation to Microsoft, and all of that due diligence, but I wanted to put together an escalation checklist that goes beyond it. Kudos to Microsoft Support and Microsoft PFEs.

The seven things you should do are: 1. Review the Service Pack and Cumulative Update Level  2. Reboot / Recycle  3. Eliminate Third-Party Add-ons as the Issue  4. Engineers Escalate / Partner / Awareness (maybe you could solve the problem in-house if you asked engineering)  5. Isolate the Issue  6. Code Issue  7. Reach Out to the Community (Twitter and/or Newsgroups).

With the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic, you will not need to worry about your third-party add-on.  Semaphore has been tested and proven in huge, complex organization-wide SharePoint deployments for your peace of mind.

Ken Toth, January 24, 2012

1. SharePoint Joel Lists Seven Actions to Take Before Calling Microsoft | Mastering Sharepoint says:

   January 24, 2012 at 1:04 am

   [...] We had a meeting today to discuss what we should do prior to … … Read the rest here: SharePoint Joel Lists Seven Actions to Take Before Calling Microsoft ← Get SharePoint Into Your Business | New Blog [...]

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2. The Heat in SharePoint Semantics: January 20 – January 27 : Beyond Search says:

   January 31, 2012 at 5:59 am

   [...] first post that I would like to share with you is entitled “SharePoint Joel Lists Seven Actions to Take Before Calling Microsoft Support.” This post shares helpful hints on how to solve your SharePoint issues on your own before having [...]

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