Microsoft yesterday pulled another patch, this one released Tuesday, that was meant to fix OneDrive for Business, the online storage service for employees running Office 365.
On Wednesday, Microsoft revised the advisory associated with "KB2889866," the designation for a non-security update that shipped Sept. 9, part of a larger collection of performance, stability and reliability repairs for Office 2013, the firm's latest productivity suite.
"We are investigating an issue that is affecting the September 2014 update for Microsoft OneDrive for Business," Microsoft said in the revised advisory. "Therefore, we have removed the update from availability for now. We apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause."
On the plus side, Computerworld could find no threads that mentioned the patch or reported problems on Microsoft's peer-to-peer support discussion forums, signaling that either the company's engineers found the flaw or that the bug was reported through more formal support channels, perhaps by a major enterprise customer with a premium support contract.
The issues that the original patch was to fix revolved around synchronization, with the targeted problems covering scenarios when customers tried to sync another user's library or moved the "Favorites" folder -- where saved Web URLs are saved -- from the PC's own storage to a network location.
Microsoft's advisory did not provide a timeline for a re-released fix or explain what went wrong with the update; nor did the Office engineering team offer a timetable in a brief note appended to a Tuesday blog post.
The removal of the Office for Business patch was in stark contrast to last month, when Microsoft faced a storm of criticism after an Aug. 12 security update crippled thousands of PCs, most of them running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft pulled the update only after several days of customer complaints, and took two weeks to re-issue the fix.
OneDrive for Business is included with every commercial edition of Office 365, the rent-not-own software subscription, and can also be purchased separately by businesses and other organizations. It is the enterprise version of the better-known OneDrive for consumers.