Office 14.2.4

Does an Office 2011 application need to be launched at least once prior to running any additional updates? It almost sounds like that's what you're seeing here since you said you did a fresh 14.2.0 install.

no, i have installed updates without ever launching, but you may have to install 14.2.3 first, not all Office updates are cumulative in nature. I have not looked into it yet.

System requirements
Supported operating systems: Apple Macintosh, Mac OS X

Operating System Versions: Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or a later version of Mac OS

Note To verify that your computer meets these minimum requirements, on the Apple menu, click About This Mac.
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 1 (14.1.0): You can download this update for free from the Microsoft Web Site.

It should be a cumulative update . I think only when going from one service pack version to another would you need to install multiple updates.

I haven't run into an error like "Cannot install on volume / because it is disabled." before. Have no idea what would cause that. Have you tried Googling that error message?

John, is your error above from a regular policy or from an imaging session? If from the latter, it could be that it won't install on anything but the boot disk, i.e, can't install from a Netbooted or TDM session.

i just installed on my system, with 14.2.3 silently, so it seems to work just fine

Tried to install on my 14.2.2 and it errored out. Updated to 14.2.3 then 14.2.4 without any issues.

So even if the update is cumulative it seems their version check requires 14.2.3.

Does the 14.2.4 update correct the permissions on the /Applications/Microsoft 2011/ folder & below?

At least on my install they all show as:
Owner - System R/W
Group - Admin R/W
Everyone - Read Only

@tomt, you just installed 14.2.3, didn't do anything else and then the latest update ran successfully?
If so, seems we're going backwards. :( I can understand it not installing on top of a 14.1.x installation (despite their release notes) but it should install on top of any 14.2.x version. jeez, come on Microsoft!

I tweeted this issue to @schweib and he is going to pass it on to the Office Team.

I've been able to confirm this as well in tests. The 14.2.4 update will only install on top of 14.2.3, not any other version of 14.2.x or 14.1.x, despite what the MS KB article states.
In digging around inside their install pkg, I see that each individual install package has a vrs.py python script that sets the _kMinVersion to 14.2.3.0.0. This in turn gets called by a postflight script in each package. So, either a developer messed up, or the KB article is wrong. I'm betting on the latter, given the minimum version setting shows up in pretty much every individual pkg.

We have a case in with our Microsoft rep as well, and they are checking into it.

I've never run into the issue of updates failing to install, I have however been unable to deploy updates for Office via casper due to the fact that with our volume license, it activates on first run. I have found if I install updates on top of a fresh install that has not been run it breaks the activation.

Fraser, what versions and order are you deploying? There was an issue with some of the updaters after 14.2.0 breaking this. But if you went right from a fresh install of 14.2.0 up to 14.2.3 this seemed to get fixed, in that last update. I haven't tested that yet for this latest update though.

It's been a bit since I tested, I'll try again with the most recent patches. I believe our installer is 14.0.x. Was going from 14.0 to 14.1.x to 14.2.x.