Can't open Office 2011 files on CIFS/SMB shares.

That's odd because my original aliases were mounted from cifs://<server>/<share>

I tried it manually though and lo and behold it worked after using Go > Connect To Server. Even more interesting is when I tried to re-create the same connection that was working as a new alias - it went back to its erroneous ways.

Look like you're right you need to manually connect with CIFS for now, but from what I can tell it ONLY works manually. Aliases seem to be broken?

Oops I spoke too soon. So while that solution did allow me to open the file, I'm now noticing everything is locked in READ ONLY.

Still broken....

I traced the READ ONLY problem back to something unrelated to this. So right now it just seems I can mount a CIFS share manually and it works fine, but not with an Alias. Hopefully this is something Apple can address with an update.

Thanks for the help.

I've had more time to play with this lately. I'm still having the issue and I've tested a few systems, new Yosemite installs, etc. I've discovered our smb server does connect at SMB3 and when you try smb://, and that causes the "file needs repair" error. If you run commands in Terminal to force an SMB1 mount, or just use the CIFS prefix, then they open - but in READ-ONLY mode. This doesn't happen in OS X Mavericks or earlier. I'm not in a position to tweak our smb server, so I tried to tweak the client first:

I've never trusted the Apple implementation of smb, so I used the older article for replacing the SMB stack in Mavericks (http://blog.helloyama.com/post/77813860132/replacing-the-os-x-10-9-mavericks-smb -stack-with) to install Samba for Yosemite. I believe I succeeded. Interestingly enough, it didn't fix anything. I'm not 100% sure I did it right, so if someone else with this issue wants to try and confirm be my guest.

Upon suggestion from an Apple purist 😉, I tried opening from the smb share with Numbers instead. Works great. I was able to export an xlsx file and overwrite the original excel spreadsheet. Still doesn't open in Office 2011 for mac, but it's something in a pinch....

The fact that replacing the smb stack changed nothing, combined with the fact that certain users with certain smb servers running aren't having problems, leads me to conclude the problem isn't Apple, but that Office 2011 still has a Yosemite bug that's going largely unnoticed for some, but not for everyone. A bug that changes the way it communicates with some SMB servers in Yosemite, but not all of them.

I don't know what I can suggest to our server admin to fix the issue, and if I suggest the idea that Office 2011 seems to be the focal point of the problem, I'm sure they'll opt to change nothing and blame Office 2011.

If anyone has a suggestion that might fix or fool Office 2011 to behaving, I'd love to try it. Probably I'm looking at waiting for a Microsoft update I'll be lucky if I ever see, or the next generation of Office for Mac apps as Office 365 moves forward. Any other ideas? I'm out of them...

Okay I found a partial solution. Our server is NetApp as well. Our admin is planning an ONTAP upgrade soon but for now SMB3 and Yosemite have problems communicating (not connecting per se) with this particular server; I tested the same files over SMB3 to my own OS X server and had no issues. The solve for this conversation is still absolutely correct but there's a caveat:

If you connect over SMB3 and try to open an Office file and get the file is damaged and need repair error, you can only cancel the message really but it turns out that Office 2011 still creates a lock file that's hidden to the OS, and fails to remove it. So even if you downgrade your connection to CIFS, Office 2011 (and ONLY Office 2011) sees the lock file and defaults to READ-ONLY. If you accidentally lock any file to READ-ONLY because of SMB3, just do this to unlock it and it will work fine in CIFS:

1. In terminal use the command "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE".
2. Hold down Option/Alt and right-click (or Ctrl+Click) the Finder icon in the dock, select "Relaunch".
3. You should now see the hidden lock files on the share starting with a ~ …Remove them (not always wise in standard practice but in THIS instance it's just a nuisance file).
4. Now with a CIFS mount, all should work as normal again.
5. To re-hide hidden files run the first and second steps again but change TRUE to FALSE.

Last but not least, the following Terminal command isn't completely necessary, but it helped to stupid proof all mounting even folder aliases and Profile Manager mounts:

echo "[default]" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf; echo "smb_neg=smb1_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

Just delete the file and restart to undo. This command really helped to stabilize my setup though.

Yeah I'm still having random bugs where one moment Office saves to a cifs share just fine, and the next it can't rename the temp file to the original file name and delete the original file (as it does in a save command). It throws roughly the same error you describe. I've tried remounting and that doesn't seem to immediately help. Sometimes rebooting helps, but the error comes back. To be honest I've just reverted to using my Windows VM since I don't have time for all these little bugs, and my system admin is loathe to upgrade our NetApp until the patches for Yosemite compatibility are tried and true. And that will probably happen far sooner than Apple will admit their SMB3 implementation is flawed in the fact that it requires vendors to develop specific patches just for it.

One suggestion I made was to enable NFS functionality. That may or may not be a legitimate suggestion to some (it wasn't in my case), but it could be for others. Get NFS working and you could potentially bypass all this SMB ridiculousness. Every iteration of SMB I've dealt with since Lion has been fraught with ridiculousness IMO. Fix it today it will still break tomorrow - that's Apple's SMB legacy so far. Where I really need a reliable share for OS X I'm just using their native AFP, and I'm sure they love it that way. Sorry I know that's more of a rant than a helpful answer, but it's been the cold hard truth in my experience so far.

What command specifically? If it's showing hidden files, yeah nothing changes until you restart Finder. So either restart your macbook pro, or hold option and right-click the Finder icon in your dock, and select "Relaunch" - assuming that's what you meant.

Recently this issue became 100% solved in our organization. It just started working one day and I confirmed our administrator performed an ONTAP upgrade for our NetApp service. Both sides will probably point fingers across at one-another I'm sure. It would be nice to see Apple keep their SMB implementation to something that plays nice with other non-AFP/NFS centric solutions. With my users needing more and more bandwidth every year, CIFS has just got to go.