Microsoft MVPs continue to help the community by sharing their profound technical knowledge and demonstrating leadership. In this article, we spotlight Rudy Ooms, an Enterprise Mobility MVP from the Netherlands, and explore his insightful troubleshooting story that made a significant impact in addressing a real-world challenge.
Rudy found a question in the Microsoft Management Customer Connection Program (MM CCP) regarding the 0x800705B4 error. The individual posting the question referenced a previous blog post by Rudy where he shared the same error, however, it was not exactly the same case. Therefore, he quickly decided to step in to help the person who posted this question.
“The moment I noticed the question popping up in the MM CCP, I became aware of the fact that the problem he was experiencing wasn’t a simple one and was giving him and his company a lot of issues and headaches. So, at that point in time, I really needed to help him out. When taking a closer look at the issue, I quickly understood that the Microsoft support desk could find it difficult to solve this case. Why? If you can’t reproduce it yourself it can become difficult to solve it and that’s where I come in”.
The issue was the device sync issue that impacted on new Autopilot enrollments due to error 0x800705b4. Rudy promptly set up his test device, started troubleshooting with his familiar tool Fiddler, went through a lot of trial and error such as using the SyncML tool, and he discovered that an illegal XML character was the culprit. By removing the assignment of the policy and the autopilot settings within the registry, he successfully mitigated the issue and made devices sync and new enrollments worked smoothly. For a comprehensive insight into his challenges and the adjustments he undertook, we highly recommend delving into the detailed narrative on his blog post. Rudy mentions that he helped another individual on the WinAdmins Discord channel facing the exact same issue.
https://call4cloud.nl/2023/06/the-0x800705b4-error-in-our-stars/
“After digging into the issue and finding the culprit within 24 hours yeah that felt pretty good,” Rudy is looking back on his contribution. Despite the lack of access to the questioner's company's tenants, the reason behind the early resolution of the situation was his desire to help, as well as his ability to improve his own troubleshooting skills by identifying the cause of the problem. This experience taught him a couple of things, ”It reminds me that you can learn new stuff every day… even when you thought you knew everything about SYNCML. And the MS community is strong and always willing to help – and so am I!”
The Product Group at Microsoft recognizes this wonderful troubleshooting story. Juanita Baptiste, Senior Program Manager, said of Rudy's and the rest of the MVP community's contributions, “The MVP community is more than just customers to bounce ideas off of. They are experts in their areas and cover more scenarios than we think. I have changed the design specs and features based on feedback from this community and it’s helped us build a better product. We can’t help everyone at the level of detail that MVPs (like Rudy) does, but the fact that they have each other for support and is an immense help to us!”
This story is the best practice of helping each other as a community. Whether you are an MVP or not, everyone has the ability to help others by sharing unique expertise and experience. Next, it is your turn. For example, the following sites (not limited to just the following, of course) can help you make a difference right away, starting today!
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