MacBU explains accident

The development lead for Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (MacBU) sustained engineering meta-team has offered an explanation for the company's recent accidental release of some Mac Office updates via the team blog. The slip occurred last Tuesday, December 12th, when Microsoft mistakenly posted pre-release binaries of an Office 11.3.1 update that were staged internally as part of the company's testing for a forthcoming release. "Things were a little crazy here on Wednesday and Thursday working out what happened and how we should resolve the problem," the blog post read. "We need to test the actual download process to make sure we've got the right URLs in place, that the right bits are up on the server, etc. On Tuesday, while testing that download process for an upcoming Office patch, we accidentally released the bits to the live servers." The blog notes that the patch included some normal stability issues as well as prepatory work for an upcoming security release. The Redmond-based company has posted detailed instructions on how to uninstall the un-released code, and is working on a utility to automatically remove the patches.

by MacNN Staff