Microsoft is Listening

There’s a back-story to my post titled SSIS 2016 CTP 3 and Data Flow Column LineageID. I’ll get to the story in a minute, but first I’d like to say that every company has excellent customer service. You don’t believe me? Ask them, “Company, do you have excellent customer service?” They will all answer, “Yes. Yes we do.”

Microsoft has been engaging the software development community and MVP’s for years – decades, even. As a former SQL Server MVP, I was repeatedly told Microsoft is listening and that my thoughts and suggestions were welcome. So I shared my thoughts and suggestions, like many of my colleagues in the community. Most of our suggestions were not implemented. Many were marked “Works as designed” or “Will not fix” at Microsoft Connect. Granted, no one can implement every feature or even correct every single bug. It’s a) not possible; and b) not cost-effective to do so. But after quite a bit of time making requests and up-voting the excellent requests of others – and then seeing disappointing responses – I (and many others) realized some other force was driving the agenda for Microsoft’s development teams and overriding our suggestions. Many became jaded as a result. I will confess some jading occurred on my part.

Recently, I and others began hearing fresh calls for thoughts and suggestions. My first (somewhat jaded) thought was, “That’s nice. That’s real nice.” (…which is a reference to an old Southern US joke that I will classify as “unkind”…)

The Story

About the time SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.1 was released, I read about the features I covered in the post titled SSIS 2016 CTP 3 and Data Flow Column LineageID. As I worked through some demo packages, however, I found some things did not appear to work – at least not yet; not in the Visual Studio 2015 SSIS template. I communicated with the SSIS team and was pleasantly surprised to receive an email stating they would attempt to work the changes into CTP 3.3. I was optimistic, if cautiously so.

After SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.3 was released, I received a follow-up email from the team member who had addressed the concerns I identified – apologizing for the long wait and pointing to a detailed blog post describing the implementation of the updated features. </Applause!>

Conclusion

It’s one thing to say you’re listening to your community. It’s a different thing to actually listen to your community. One is some words. The other is some action.

I’m happy to report Microsoft is, in fact, listening. I couldn’t be happier. Thank you!

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Andy Leonard

andyleonard.blog

Christian, husband, dad, grandpa, Data Philosopher, Data Engineer, Azure Data Factory, SSIS guy, and farmer. I was cloud before cloud was cool. :{>

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