Microsoft Office 2011 sp2 pulled

Rumor is the delivery mechanism was the cause, but I also talked to a couple engineers who tested and saw the update "install" and none of the MS apps actually got upgraded to 14.2.
So, the silence is odd. That said, I upgraded ~4 Macs so far without issue - all using manual download.

[RANT]

Silence is what you get when Microsoft doesn't invite folks like us to test these new releases and patches. Silence is what you get when the developers/engineers at Microsoft want to (continue to) fly under the radar.

When jud Spencer (yes, lower case "j") lead the Claris Em@iler team (mid-late 90's), we had quite a lively group who exposed issues and helped jud and his team fix the reported issues. When jud moved on to Microsoft to start the Entourage project, he didn't have the freedom to have these semi-open forums, so Entourage got off on a bad foot and never really recovered.

One thing I will say, and I hope jud doesn't get offended, is that the Entourage monolithic database may have sounded good on a white board, but in hind sight it was the Achilles heel of the Entourage application. Had there been a semi-open forum, that route may not have been taken. When jud moved on to bigger and better things at Microsoft, they eventually decided to drop the monolithic database idea and go with flat files (kudos!), it gave Outlook the solid foundation that Entourage lacked.

I really wish Microsoft would open their doors to some of us weather beaten admin curmudgeons who like to blow $#!+ up in a LAB. Microsoft would be better off, and so would their millions of Mac users. Hopefully this 14.2.0 update fiasco opened some eyes over there. :)

[/RANT]

Don

Don-

It'll never happen. Ever. At my last employ, we ran into a problem with Office 2011 SP1. Being a facility that operated in the DoD space, we had been making a concerted effort to get ahead of the coming increase in encryption requirements. So, all central services were using certificates that used SHA-256.

When Microsoft came out with Office 2011 SP1, Exchange authentication broke for us. After some digging (and Microsoft espousing that it was a problem on our end and not theirs) we found that Outlook couldn't authenticate if the certs were SHA-256-based. We brought clear evidence back to Microsoft and they went back to the devs. When they came back to us a few days later, it was, "Oops, we forgot to compile that module in."

In the aftermath, one of the things that we asked for was access straight to the devs so that we could test out these releases before they hit prod. It was easier (and cheaper) for MS to fix things as they arise rather than scramble back and fix them afterwards. Also, our point was that we were an odd environment. If anyone was going to find oddball issues, it was us.

They refused. All the way up to the VP level.

If MS won't do it for a Government/DoD entity, they're not going to do it for anyone.

I've upgraded about 25 machines. All working, just reporting both 14.1.4 and 14.2.0 installed.

Come again Matt? Are you saying the Macs you've upgraded so far are reporting both 14.1.4 and 14.2.0 installed? Or did you mean something else? 'Cause that would just be... weird :)
I think we're going to sit tight and wait to see what the Mac MS team issues as a new update before we do anything.

Its reporting both installed even though only one is installed.

Casper will report what System Profiler tells it. If you run System Profiler on a machine what do you see there for version?

OK, odd. I wonder if that's because the scripts in the pkg are not cleaning up some files that it needs to when done installing. Although I assumed the JSS pulled version info directly from the Info.plist inside the application bundle, such as the CFBundleVersion string. Maybe it uses something else?

Edit: Ah, well there is my answer :)