More ghosts and unable to do their job

Here's another goodie that came across my desk that I have to deal with. This woman was frustrated to the point of tears...


Hello [ME],

Firstly, Thank you for the assistance that you're about to provide. I've been dealing with these types of issues for months now and would really like to do my job where the mistakes are because I made them.

There are 3 areas to take a look at.

1. Google Calendar - Anytime that I have proposed a meeting, changed something in a proposal, whatever, I almost always get the "oops" error message, I refresh and it seems to keep whatever I have done with that proposal.

Yesterday - For the first time in a long time, I had a proposal that I created on Jan. 7th on my Director's calendar on 3/1 and 3/2 for a new scientist offsite ...GONE! I called the help desk immediately after I re-proposed the offsite (to ensure that the senior staff has it on their calendars).

These glitches fosters my not trusting this program which is a problem, because I am a heavy user and 3 large conference room designate (here in B-42)

I would be grateful if these functions were dependable by;

1. Keeping the proposals on the calendars (issues in the past with drop proposals from other creators in the conference rooms I manage)

2. I didn't get an error message that really has no meaning to me but happens almost every time through out the day.

3. Gave the public a chance to see availability on conference rooms and who the creator is (42-1C, D &E) and on another area (42-3Q & 42-3L) can see availability but can not book

Ghosts in the system

Wow, this was an interesting and tough week. Not only did I get one large group screaming at me about their woes with Google Calendar, I had three separate instances where people are complaining about magically moving or disappearing meetings. One of the calendars with problems is a critical high throughput piece of equipment's scheduling tool. Damn it Google, why can't you stabalize your Calendaring product?!

Email:

Thanks for the note [X], and sorry to hear about your problems.

I know how critical system scheduling is, especially for a high throughput lab such as yours, so I have cc'd [MANAGER] who has been our key gApps liaison, to see if we can get some immediate attention. For distribution to a number of other key individuals, you could also post a description of the problem to the internal forum tool.

Hopefully this will provide some focused attention, and we can follow up at the next [GROUP] meeting (on Thursday), as well.

Best,

[Y]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 12:20 AM, [X] wrote:
Greetings,

As a possible topic for [GROUP] I'd like to raise the issue of "wandering events" on Calendar. We have a Calendar account for our key lab equipment and it has been useless lately because events (bookings) keep randomly moving or disappearing.

[Z] owns the calander account and she has a ticket in with the help desk, but I suspect they don't understand it as their only advice is ridiculously generic and we're not seeing any real effort at trouble-shooting what is for us a very real problem with running the lab.

Can you find out if similar problems are widespread or at least known? Why can't we get a "trace" or log on the account changes, some debugging info that might help figure out what the heck is going on?

Kind regards,

[Y]

The start of the painful journey...Google Calendar and Google Apps

Well, today's the day. I finally can not keep information in any longer about Google Calendar and the problems I and my company are having with it. Google, I know that you're trying hard but it's reached the point now where many people are pointing out the obvious, but it isn't getting fixed. Why don't the basics work? Why do meetings go missing? Why is it so difficult to release builds on a regular basis that have been fully SQA regression tested? Why does my group have to constantly provide this level of support for your product?

Starting today, I will start listing the issues that the company I work for has with Google Calendar in hopes that they get the recognition they need and serve to inform the larger community about the pitfalls of this product. I sincerely hope that this drives improvements to this foundational tool used by millions of people around the globe.

Here's an email message I got from one of my colleagues yesterday that I now have to deal with (names are hidden to protect the identity of individuals):

"Hi B,

John came to me today to report a problem Tom was
having with gCal. Tom was upset again, and reported that his
manager was either implying or directly saying he was not being
productive. John explained that Tom had a big mess on his
hands trying to manage a recurring meeting that was extended through
2010, but had a number of conflicts.

Although I did not speak with Tom today, it sounds like his manager is going to want
to speak directly to Christine (the responsible manager) pretty soon. I'm not sure when that will
happen, but it doesn't seem like a matter of "if" as much "when".

I just wanted to give you a heads up since I will be out next week."

Why? Why, why, why Google has my job been reduced to running constant interference for your product?