Only a minor issue in reality, but a reminder to treat our own systems like we treat our customers production environment – plan your changes!
Today I was offered a client-side Microsoft Office update as part of our entitlement to use Office on our client machines – part of our Office 365 subscription (as a partner we get E3 which is awesome and helped us to retire a 3-box Hyper-V cluster running our ‘on-premise’ VM’s hosted in a Data Centre, but that’s another post…).
Anyway, thinking nothing of it I clicked on yes, go ahead and make my day with the updates, to then be told I need to get out of Outlook and Lync – DOH! I hadn’t thought this through as I was busy working with quite a few windows open…
I decided to hold off on the update, leaving the dialogue box open and thinking I’d leave it till lunchtime (instead I’m writing a long overdue blog post 
), but later double clicked on a an Excel spread sheet I wanted to edit to be told that ‘Office is busy’ and EXCEL.EXE can’t be used right now…
DOH! again – Just because I didn’t close Outlook and Lync to allow the update to update those programs didn’t mean that the update didn’t continue with what it could do (as I allowed it after all) with the rest of the Office components..
So, the moral of the story is simple – plan your changes!! just because we are now in a time when even our client software is ‘Cloud’ with regard to management and updates, often getting monthly patches to enhance functionality or address a new vulnerability doesn’t mean we should become blasé with our attitude of when to install them.
Which reminds me, now when did I last backup this device? a lovely Surface Pro which is also my ‘desktop’ PC….hmmm… a job for later me thinks!