Sunday, April 22, 2012

Microsoft Pulls AutoUpdate for Office SP2 Mac

After releasing Office 2011 Service Pack 2 for Mac users earlier this week, Microsoft began noticing reports from customers who were experiencing problems with the update. The company has since decided to stop distributing SP2 through AutoUpdate.

In a blog post over at Office: mac, Microsoft states that, “On April 12th, we released SP2 for Office for Mac 2011. The majority of our customers have been delighted with the improvements – new features and performance."

“Unfortunately,” Steve Ballmer's company continues, “a small percentage are experiencing some issues with the update, specifically related to the Outlook for Mac database. We’ve documented the primary issue and work around in a blog post that can be found here,” says Microsoft.

Microsoft has support and workarounds available for the following situations:

Before installing Office 2011 SP2, use the following article to rebuild your database in 14.1.4 to ensure that your database is in a good state for the upgrade to safely apply: Rebuild the Outlook for Mac 2011 database to resolve problems

If you’ve already installed Office 2011 SP2, and you receive the message ‘Please upgrade the Office database,’ please check out the following article for the workaround: Outlook 2011 start error: “Please upgrade the Office database”

The Redmond, Washington-based company says that since its goal is to provide the simplest update experience for everyone, “we have temporarily stopped pushing out the SP2 update through Microsoft AutoUpdate while we investigate the issue.”

Those who are determined to download and install this update regardless of this potential drawback, can visit the Microsoft Downloads site to manually grab the service pack.

However, Microsoft strongly encourages customers to “either wait for the AutoUpdate, or follow the directions in the above blog post before manually updating to ensure you don’t experience issues.”

The Windows makers promise to have an update ready for customers once they have more information to share.

"We apologize to users who were affected by this issue. Users who successfully updated report very noticeable improvements including performance and a host of other fixes,” Microsoft concludes.