Ramblings, meanderings, rants and discoveries.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Microsoft, Digital RIver and other Pains

OK, so the trial version of Office is expired, my daughter needs a word processor, she is used to word. First let me say when the trial version expires, you cannot do anything except view documents. This seems to have affected my ability to print to file even in other applications. That annoys me.

So I suck it up and go off to the Microsoft site to "convert" my product. Digital River runs that side of it. I mutter and fuss and fill out the forms using my husband's credit card (No paypal accepted - that is also annoying, but I'll deal with it). I send off all the info and start checking my account for the confirmation e-mail, nothing. Now it IS Saturday, I mention it to my husband the next morning, He says yeah whenever he has ordered ANYTHING on a weekend it has not gone through till Monday. OK then.

Monday still nothing not even a hey we got the order. I send a note to customer service. Finally a flag is placed on the online invoice with a note there is a problem with the order. I start checking e-mail. Again nothing.

Today I finally get back a note that state the order was cancelled, most likely for one of the following reasons:

1 I cancelled it (I did not)
2. Digital River received no response from the verification e-mail (yeah well, it is difficult to respond to something one never receives)
3. My home address doesn't match the home address on the credit card. (Uh yeah it does at least according to everyone ELSE online including Amazon)

Did I mention that I used to work in data management, including credit card verification and telecheck verification? There are several types of software and some are more sophisticated than others. Some get weirded out if a word is not exactly the same (St. vs Street or even vs St) Some are more forgiving, either way all that do not match kick out a report with the offending record and it is easy to research this. You pull up the order and the on file address and check. Yeah it takes a literate human to do this. Probably all of about a 3rd grade reading level.
I am guessing that either Digital River or their 3rd party verification company is lacking employees with that specialized skill. Perhaps Microsoft should subsidize a literacy program for their suppliers? Just a thought. So, who knows a word processing app that will read and allow us to work with Word .docs? Seems I am in the market.

4 comments:

Ajoy Bhatia said...

Hi... I know this is such an old post but, anyway, I just came across it when I searched for "microsoft digital river" on Google. I also recently bought MS Office 2007 from MS via Digital River for my daughter because she is used to MSWord. That's how MS catches them young - by donating their software to schools.
Anyway, you may have already bought MS Word or be using something else, but a great alternative to MSOffice is the OpenOffice.org suite of tools. It's available free from www.openoffice.org. Sun Microsystems is the main organization behind it. There is a word processor that can read Word docs (but not Word 2007 yet, I think) and a spreadsheet, a presentation composer and a drawing application. The interface is quite similar to Word pre-Office 2007, and my daughter used it for a while but then downloaded the MSOffice 2007 trial and I had to buy it when the trial expired.

Ajoy Bhatia said...

Oh.... and another thing. Did the verification mail - by any chance - go into your Junk Mail folder? Did you check there later?

Dee said...

i had the same problem. have been waiting to receive the key and haven't. At least my card hasn't been charged yet.

D

Zeta Thompson said...

Open Office Is great, but you know I mainly use text editors.