Software as a Service (SaaS) - Brave new World

[Mario]

I use an Office 365 subscription. For many years.

Turned my computer off last night normally and it booted this morning normally.

Shortly after restart, my anti-virus notified me of a new product version. So I let it update itself. It wanted a reboot, so OK.
After the reboot it wanted to contact their 'software installation server' but failed. The only chance I had in that dialog was to press Cancel.
Nothing bad happened.

Checking the 'control center' of the anti-virus an hour later showed that an update was still pending. Sigh. So, again. Download, install, reboot.
This time it worked. Great. Computers. You just have to love them 

I continued to work for a few hours.

When I tried to check my email, the task bar shortcut for Outlook no longer worked.
After locating the Office installation folder on my hard disk, I found that many of the DLLs and executable files in that folder were gone. WTF?

Did Office uninstall itself...?
Did the Virus Checker upgrade installation somehow removed my Office installation?
Did a Windows silent update uninstall my Office installation?
...


I checked my Microsoft customer account and my Office subscription is valid till August 2019. No problem there.

I then tried a quick repair via the corresponding Microsoft Office app in the Windows Control Panel. No luck.
Then I did a full-repair, which claims to resolve all problems. I had to log into my Microsoft account and then let the repair run. It actually fixed the problem by downloading and reinstalling all Office products.

After starting Outlook, it stalled for a while. Then another dialog popped up, asking me to log into my Office account to complete the installation. I switched to another app to retrieve my password, and the "log in" dialog somehow vanished "behind" Outlook and was unreachable. Bugger.

I finally coaxed the log-in dialog to show again by minimizing all apps to the desktop and then activating Outlook via the Task Manager. A trick that often works in such situations.
After entering my password, the Office installation completed and Outlook is working again. Phew!

What a nasty surprise. I have no clue about what happened, but Google tells me that this is not that uncommon.

Lesson learned:

When you rent software instead of actually purchasing it, you are always in danger of the software stopping to work. For whatever reason.
Computer problem. Faulty license check implementation. License server down. No Internet connection. Your account being closed for whatever reason, even by accident. Bad weather or moon phase, ...

[JohnZeman]

Wow.  Thanks for the heads up on this Mario.  I also use 365 and have had some problems with it but none like you just had.  I'm going to make a note of what all you did in case it happens to me too.

[wolboe]

Ich konnte mich mit dieser Art der Softwarenutzung noch nie anfreunden - auch wenn Du sicher eine Einzelfall (?) bist - meine Skepsis hat sich hier bestätigt.
Für mich wären es sicher einige Tage Arbeit gewesen, um alles wieder zum Laufen zu bringen.

[Mario]

Wow.  Thanks for the heads up on this Mario.  I also use 365 and have had some problems with it but none like you just had.  I'm going to make a note of what all you did in case it happens to me too.

I'm still puzzled about this. I've compared the contents of the Office folder from this morning (when the problem appeared) with the backup (I DO backups) from last evening. There were several hundred files missing on my disk.

What I noticed is that the Office Modify/Uninstall app in the Windows Control panel reported an install date of November 18. 2018, which is last Sunday. But the last time I've installed Office is maybe a year ago, when I've upgraded my subscription. So maybe something was installed in the background on Sunday, miraculously worked through Monday and then failed on Tuesday. I'm long enough in IT to just bob my head and say "Can happen..." in such situations

If the automatic repair would have failed I would have restored the entire Office folder form my last daily backup. Always good to have one!

Man, I'm glad not to be working at Microsoft support. There are dozens of millions of Office installations in use every day, and there should be a plenty of similar strange problems which flood the support department every day...

[herman]

A long shot....
Could you be bugged one way or another by what is described here?
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/11/20/office-too-microsoft-pulls-office-patches/

[greg]

Easy solution. Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook for the same reason I use IMatch instead of Lightroom.

[Mario]

A long shot....
Could you be bugged one way or another by what is described here?
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/11/20/office-too-microsoft-pulls-office-patches/

I think these patches were not for Office 365. But who knows...

[Mario]

Easy solution. Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook for the same reason I use IMatch instead of Lightroom.

Sorry, but TB does not offer the workflow options and connectors I rely on. I try to keep my entire setup as flexible and portable as possible.
I work with Outlook for over 10 years and so far it never let me down. I use FF as my main browser, of course.

[DigPeter]

   SMUG

I do not believe in "the cloud" - not Office 365, Adobe, One Drive, etc -  and this just confirms that.

[Mario]

I work a lot in 'the cloud' now (e.g. running all my test systems now no longer physically here in the lab, but renting a couple of Windows or Linux machines for a few hours, when needed).
But I don't use technologies which lock me into one of the vendors (Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure).

I store a second backup of my data in the cloud, but only in encrypted form and I have the original files and the first set of backups locally available.

I think using the new technologies but not relying on them is the key.
Not taking them for granted (especially the free ones).
Reducing dependencies.

[Aubrey]

Maybe my gmail account is not too bad after all!
I know they have all my information, but who doesn't nowadays?

Aubrey.

[Mario]

Whatever works for you is good.

But I prefer to run my own mail server (which usually comes with your own web site). For a few bucks per month you not only have a web site but also one, two or even hundreds of email addresses and your own mail server.

IMHO much better than Google reading every of your email, recording the people you are in contact with (and the people they are in contact width) and feeding your private correspondence to the Google AI...

I have a gmail account but I use it only to communicate with Google ;-)

[Aubrey]

As I run my own website, I setting up my own mail server is a project I've been thinking about.

Aubrey.