Forum Discussion
Cannot Release Lock on SharePoint Online File
Locks is a complex topic and technically a client or network issue. SharePoint supports co-authoring locks unless you have Check In/Out enabled on the library. Client side locks will occur if Office cannot negotiate a co-author lock falling back to an exclusive lock. As others have pointed out, the upload center can contribute to locking and is one of the first things you should check. You can trace the calls via Fiddler on the client.
This is the technical explanation from PSS:
When a user attempts to open an Office file hosted on SharePoint in the Office client, there is an expected set of network calls we should be seeing unless there is a problem. Once a user clicks that Office file to open in client, code on the SharePoint page and (if using Internet Explorer) the Office 365 browser addon sends a command to initialize the client application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Once the Office client application starts launching, Office will start a HTTP conversation with SharePoint. If the Office call is already authenticated, the Office will be returned the file content. However, if not already authenticated, which is usually expected to be the case, Office will negotiate for Authentication with SharePoint. This process happens through two networking calls called OPTIONS calls. The first OPTIONS call is anonymous and expected to be rejected by SharePoint as to establish what types of authentication SharePoint will accept. The second options call will include the requested authentication information to SharePoint. If SharePoint accepts the second options, call, it will return a METHOD call, identifying what network verbs can be used to communicate with it (OPTIONS, GET, LOCK, PROPFIND, and POST are all examples of verbs for this process). Once the verbs are established the Office client will make a POST network call that requests the metadata for the file, adds the user’s session lock state (coauthor lock or exclusive lock) and to request to open the file from the CellStorage web service in SharePoint. If the Office client has never accessed the document before, the entire document will be downloaded from SharePoint and cached in the Office Document Cache. If the Office client has opened the file before, then it is already cached and only the changes will be downloaded. At this point, the Office file will open in the Office client. This entire process happens between a few milliseconds to a few seconds.
I have the same problem on a wordfile. SP Online, Library has major versions enabled but no check-out required. I'm getting "the file is locked for shared use by....myself".
I opened the document in word browser and wrote some stuff. It saved and I navigated back, when I try to change a property in a choice column, I get that error message.
I think it is a very misleading error message because I thought that co-authoring would also not work when I read "locked for shared use..". But co-authoring works, no problem.
Solution for me is to open document in client and close it. Then I can change properties without any problems.
Don't like this....
Hello
We have the same issue but in our case, its Sharepoint 2013, On-premise.
User has opened a doc in a library, made changes to word doc, tried to save and close.
The document is not able to be checked back in by domainname\user.
We then notice that the file is in th Upload Centre as "Upload failed" .. and says check out for editing by the above user.
The impact is that other users have gon in and made changes after, so versioning is turned on which means the file has been overwritten. We resolve this by comparing the document with the current versions in SP.
We have tried all of the usual fixes, like clearing the cache etc.,
We have also noticed that even though Microsoft say that the file is locked after closing for 10 mins, in one instance it took more than 30 minutes, but most cases not at all.
Thanks
