Citrix Files bug with Word (Office365) on MacOS (Catalina)

Update: (1th October 2020)
My friend @mbp_netscaler told me he tried with newly released Office 16.43 it fixes the issue with Citrix. So it was not Citrix fault but the bug was with Microsoft, interesting 🙂 but happy to share its working With Citrix Files latest release.

just Last week I was working with making some documentation of an EUC environment, I was doing for a customer and worked all day Friday. I got notified there was a newer version of Citrix Files, so I went ahead and upgraded the client as I normal do. For you as a reader you properly dont know, but I have been using Citrix Content Collaboration, the new name for (Citrix Sharefile) for around 7 years, and I am a daily user, and uses all from small files to very large datasets, when I make presentations, and it works really well, so well I have never had any issues with Citrix Content Collaboration, all the years until today. Citrix Files is the app through which you interact with Citrix Content Collaboration.

So what is the issue, well I was about to continue finishing my documentation that was saved on the Citrix Files share “personal folder” locally on my Mac and then it gets replicated up to sharefile.eu which is pretty cool. Then the file is synchronised to the cloud and there is backup and multiple version of a file. I love this service from Citrix. Issue was just my file from last Friday, after upgrading the client was not uploaded to Citrix Content Collaboration (sharefile.eu). I noticed the green “cloud icon” was not on the file. Bummer what could this be, I tried to open the file and got a strange error with the file could not be open because of file permission or I didn’t have enough memory resources and I should try opening the file in a text convertor hang on, there is something wrong here very wrong. I tried to create a new word file and save it to my personal folders in Citrix Files and save the file it was working, then I closed word and I could see the file was not getting replicated to the cloud. I then tried opening the file again and then it was broken… w00t. I then tried creating a file on my desktop copying to the personal folder in Citrix Files this was working and it got replicated and I could open it dozen times. Just to validate it further I took 3 other Mac devices and tested this issue and yes issue with latest version of Citrix Files is there, its corrupting my word document if I save it in the personal folder.

After lots of investigation I tried with an older version of Citrix Files I had on my local device and this worked fine if I created a word file and saved it to my personal folder in Citrix Files. So issue was the latest version of Citrix Files, but its not just this, all the files I had created since last Friday with this new client and saved in my personal folder was all corrupted I just lost several days work 🙁

My configuration

• Office 365 version 16.42 (20092300)
• More specific my version of Word

• Apple MacOS (Catalina)
• Citrix Files v 20.9 (10rc2)
• Citrix Content Collaboration (Sharefile.eu)

Deepdive into the bug

If you create a word document on example your desktop, and then copy this to your personal folders in Citrix Files, then as you can see on the below picture Citrix picks up the file and synchronize it to the cloud and the green means its working and all is good.

Red means not good and as you can see the files I have highlighted in the red bar have been created in the personal folder in Citrix Files from Word and when the file is saved and word is closed the file is not getting replicated, so a green button is shown as above files have, which means the file have been synchronised to the cloud.

I also noticed that if you tried to reopen the corrupted file several time that many folders was getting created as you can see below with 2001.docx.sb this can explain that behaviour where Citrix Files is trying to save the file in a folder but an error is occurring.

If you try to open a word file that you created on the personal folder you get this error:

Please note, the issue is only seen with Word and no other application.

In danish above says: check permissions for your document or drive, make sure you have enough memory and free storage. Try to open the file with a an application that can restore it. FYI I tried to use several known application that can restore word files NO luck, yes this means you have a corrupted file and this is pretty bad.

Update: 1th October 2020: (Bug issue is solved)

There is a fix for above issue, upgrade to latest Office365 version 16.43.
Bug seemed to be Word that was causing the issue with Citrix and its solved if you upgrade Office to 16.43 or newer.

kudos: (Thanks for testing and sharing Mads Pedersen)