Forum Discussion
Office 365 - Recreating the SharePoint issues.
We are on Office 365 tenant and lately have seen an increase in instances where users are experiencing the loss of their document version (Word or Excel documents) after working for hours on the document using 'Edit in Excel' or 'Edit in Word' etc. Our libraries are setup as forced checkout and when user closes the file it does give the 'Check-in' dialog where user checks the document in successfully.
When I try to recreate those issues on my machine by working on same documents making changes and leaving them open for hours etc., I am unable to experience those.
1. Since the issue happen on random, we can not really document it to take it to experts for help, can Microsoft help in such instances by investigating the logs for our Office-365 tenant ?
2. What are the possible ways to ensure the integrity of documents stored in our Office-365 SharePoint Online. Can we request a daily report of each document's location, size, version, date etc?
3. Does Microsoft have any ticketing mechanism to report our issues?
Appreciate the help. Thanks.
6 Replies
- I would recommend against the force checking in and out. Especially with the new features of co-authoring and auto-save it tends to be a clunky experience.
Are you using Office 2016 CTR? If not, that would be my first recommendation.
Is the assertion that once in SharePoint/O365 the files or file content somehow gets "lost" after they have saved the file and closed the application? I have never seen that happen for document content. Not saying it can't but...unlikely (especially in O365).
1. Confirm that versioning is on all libraries and check version history where users feel they lost data, also check the recycle bin. The default is 500 major versions for SPO modern libraries.
Confirm that permissions are set up correctly.
Always recommend to save often.
Make sure you document retention policies or other types of features aren't interfering with the document libraries.
Are they syncing the files from the document library to local drives? If so, I would turn that off. Not that it doesn't work well, but it eliminates a variable that I have had issues with.
Since they are using the client applications I would check temp files to recover lost data as well.
2. You could write a PowerShell script to pull that info down. Or a Flow into a SQL DB. I just highly doubt that is the issue. I would talk with your MSFT rep before going down this path. You should be able to feel confident that the product is working as reported and that there is nothing odd going on with your tenant.
3. If you are a tenant admin you can create an Office 365 Support ticket in the Admin Center under "Support". They provide excellent support for many Office 365 issues.Thanks Eric, for all the ideas and pointers.
The user must be on CTR (Click-to-run) as she recently did the 'Online Repair', which effectively removes the already installed office and installs the latest one.
The assertion basically is that user worked on the file for about 2 hours and made lot of changes, and after checking-in the file there was no new version saved, instead the version shown was the version that the user started from. There was no trace of the user ever checked out the document and made any changes. So the user did not see the version created for her on check-in.
We will have our central admin check with MSFT representative.
Thanks again.
>after checking-in the file there was no new version saved
Did the user save the doc and/or upload the changes, prior to checking in? If not, simply checking in the file does NOT force the upload of changes. This is sort of a common misconception for many users, especially those who've used systems that present an upload step in the Check-In process/screens.
1. Check out file
2. Download (or, Open in Client app from SharePoint)
3. Edit, then Save (and upload if manually downloaded)
4. Check-in
