Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.0 Update Broke My GAL

It sounds vaguely disgusting, doesn’t it, having one’s GAL broken?

I don’t know what’s going on. I use MSO2008 with Entourage in a corporate environment, and up until yesterday, I had no trouble whatsoever accessing my company’s global address list (GAL), which is something done via LDAP. After the update to 12.2.0, I could no longer access that GAL.

After much frustration in changing LDAP server settings, rebooting, etc., just because I thought it was my company’s fault, I decided that it might be the update that was responsible.

Fortunately, I have Time Machine running. So I first tried to revert to yesterday’s version of Entourage, but that crashed each time I launched it. Figuring that Microsoft can’t build a monolithic application to save its life and that there might be other things in the MSO 2008 folder that Entourage depends on, too, I reverted the whole folder and, guess what?

Entourage GAL access now works.

My conclusion is that the Entourage 12.2.0 update breaks GAL access somehow. I kept the updated MSO folder by renaming it “Microsoft Office 2008 12.2.0” and then restoring the older version, so I am able to keep using the new version of Word (speedier!) and Excel (tastier!).

Your milage may vary. Please comment if you have similar experiences.