SherWeb

BACKGROUND

Please give a little bit of background on your company and what you do there.

Our company does tank testing and tank cutting. I am in health and safety and human resources. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the business challenge that you were trying to address when you first approached SherWeb?

They host our website and our SharePoint site. On their website, they indicate that they have full support for SharePoint, and they do not. That’s where the bad part comes in.

Our SharePoint site was already developed and working. If it goes down, they were going to be the call  to get it back up if something went wrong. It’s only happened twice. One time, they did a Microsoft update and they reversed it, and then we got all of our client list back. The second time, they never could find a solution, and they kept saying that they were not that developed in SharePoint to be able to fix the problem.

SOLUTION

Why did you select them to work with in the beginning?

It was not my choice. They were already selected when I came onboard.

Do you know how long your company had that relationship with them?

Going back from now, I’d say three and a half to four years.

Were there any previous problems with their Web hosting?

That I don’t know, honestly. My primary work with them was only on the SharePoint site.

When did this conflict happen?

We noticed it on March 30 of this year [2014]. Our SharePoint site is an internal site only, and it’s affected the employees being able to see their payroll. Pretty important.

The problem is simple. Go to payroll, you open up the list, and you get an error. But, the error is so vague that they just seem not to be able to get past it, and they can’t seem to find the solution. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How would you describe their performance?

They would not think outside of the box. They wouldn’t try to go to a different level to find the solution to the problem.  It would always be the same contact person, and it sounded like he refused to go any higher. I will grant them that they do call you back, but they don’t call you back with any positive information. They just call you back. I don’t need a callback telling me that you can’t fix the problem. I need a callback saying, “This is the fix.” The fixes that they did send caused more problems.

What other problems arose?

Because I didn’t do [SherWeb’s recommended fix] on the vice president’s computer, I did it on mine, [and] it caused me to lose part of my database. My cookies are set up a specific way in the Internet Explorer, and so it messed up all of my cookies. It also messed up different links throughout my computer. They just said to update this, uninstall this, take it to Internet Explorer 11. SharePoint does not work in a 64-bit Internet Explorer. It does not work with Office 2010 64, and they swore up and down, “Yes. It does.” No. It doesn’t. Microsoft even says it doesn’t on their website.

I did everything they told me, and in turn, it messed up components of my Office. It was just a disaster.

What’s the current status? Are you still working with them?

We don’t have a choice. They’re hosting our website. If we knew how to back up what we have of SharePoint, the whole thing, take it off their site, and then maybe transport it to another hosting entity, we might do that. But we don’t know how.