KB2768349 Breaks Connectivity Between Office 2013 and SharePoint Hosted on Office 365

Update 19/03/2013: Microsoft are currently working to resolve this issue.

Just sharing this as an observation noted on the Office 365 forums.

I installed a raft of updates on my Surface RT recently after the March 2013 patches came through and over the last couple of days I have been unsuccessful in connecting to my SharePoint site hanging off my Office 365 account (which has hosted Exchange, Lync and SharePoint included). I would encounter the following error message over and over.

Call us overprotective but we need to verify your account again before opening this document.

No amount of re-entering my username and password would get the pesky login box to go away leaving my documents stranded up on SharePoint.

Anyway, digging around the Office 365 forums it appears that KB2768349 is the culprit here which updates a few files, including:

  • mso.dll
  • msointl.dll

I uninstalled the updates for these two files via Windows Update as follows:

  1. Close all Office apps,
  2. From the Start Screen type Control Panel and hit Enter,
  3. In Control Panel type Windows Update,
  4. Click on View update history in the window,
  5. Click on Installed Updates at the top of the update history window,
  6. Locate Update for Microsoft OFfice 2013 (mso.msp 15.0.4481.1005) in the list and right click on it,
  7. Click Uninstall,
  8. Locate Update for Microsoft OFfice 2013 (msointl.msp 15.0.4481.1005) in the list and right click on it,
  9. Click Uninstall,
  10. Reopen an Office app and try connecting to SharePoint.

This has worked for me so far and I have asked Microsoft if the behaviour of patch KB2768349 is either a bug or by design. It also appears that this is impacting Office 2013 on the desktop as well.

3 comments

1 ping

    • Bier on March 25, 2013 at 03:24
    • Reply

    I had the same exact issue too. After these patches, I couldn’t open Office files like Word or Excel from SharePoint 365. The desktop Word application kept asking me to sign into Office 365 over and over.

    This also impacted SharePoint Workspace Synch which is now SkyDrive Pro on Windows 8.

    I created a ticket with Office 365 support and we fixed it by removing all Microsoft Office 2013 updates for KB2768348.

    They really need to get a hotfix out ASAP. Windows Update keeps trying to add it back.

    1. I have just hidden the offending update for the time being but they absolutely need to fix this promptly.

      I am beginning to think what will come first though, a bug fix or everyone being migrated to the post-upgrade version of Office 365 which doesn’t exhibit this incompatibility. The wheels can turn rather slowly at Microsoft.

  1. I had this issue too. For me, Sharepoint Designer 2013 kept asking me to login.
    I tried everything else such as:
    Messing with Internet Explorer settings
    Messing with Credentials Manager in the Control Panel

    Removing the two KB2768348 (Update for Microsoft Office 2013) and a reboot sorted it.

    Thanks.

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