Full disclaimer, yes I am a Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) fan boy. Great tool that is heavily under utilized by most Microsoft Office 365 tenants (Office 365 users). In NZ here we are a bit behind the 8ball in MIP uptake but I think once companies here in New Zealand start getting hit like those in Europe by GDPR fines thing will rapidly change.
Anyways this is not about how amazing MIP is but more about how it can frustrate the hell out of me at times... Microsoft do make it hard for me to like them sometimes!
Lets set the seen, Client runs updates and there RPA (robotic process automation) fails on some pretty important financial business processes. Why was easy, the latest office update included support for the built in MIP unified labeling for Microsoft Excel so the robotic processes did not know how to deal with Excel all of a sudden prompting for MIP labels for template that didn't already have them. A bit a quick research on the latest updates give us enough to work with... although I could have started making changes to the MIP label policies I decide the better way to go is to fix the root cause which is installing the Unified Labeling client so Excel can add a default label to Excel files that don't already have one (as per the client existing policy allows). Easy right... ah well No!
So the first error I can forgive, I think it was more to do with the VMware Horizon image that caused the upgrade of the client to fail because the C:\Windows\ccmcache folder has been cleared. So the install could not run the app uninstall correctly, fair enough! but my real issue here is with the poor error handling, every error presented to me during this diagnosis was indicating a .Net issue or an newer version of the Unified Client already being installed... come on!
The main errors were
Fatal error during installation (0x80070643)
The installer has encountered an unexpected error, code 2753
Dot Net 4.6.2 missing error in the install log
A newer version of Microsoft azure information protection is already installed final error
That last one was the clue to the fix, so it is easy to verify that the required .Net 4.6.2 was installed which was the reason the error logs gave, so started looking for how the client determines install versions. This lead me to the Reg keys in HKEY_CLASS_ROOT\Installer\Products. In this location I was able to find the two previous versions of the AIP client that was in the clients Windows 10 image.
The sub keys that needed to be removed were
40258EB50B09D0744A45B91AE7C56045
993BF6477B270F046B2A7D4C218275F2
The keys you need to remove could be different as each client version is different.
Deleting the keys was the fix to get the new Unified Labeling client installed. So why am I so pissed.
Well there was not a newer version of the client installed, in fact it was quite the opposite! I do appreciate the complexities to application development but if anyone should be leading the way on error handling it is Microsoft. I lost far more time to this error that I like to think about and I am probably just publicly venting, good thing I am too old to be considered and "Influencer" for Microsoft to worry about my rantings :)
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