Forum Discussion
Disabled Document Co-Authoring without requiring checkout
I understand it's not what you're looking for, but requiring Check-out is the easiest approach I think.
Another option might be to disable co-authoring client-side. I don't know if this still works for Office 2016 but in 2013 you were able to disable co-authoring through Group Policy as described in the article below:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/governance/disable-co-authoring
A similar question was posted here in the past, maybe you can get some helpful insights from the comments in it
Hope this helps
We're using Office 2016 MSO and don't see any client options to disable co-authoring. We also do not allow SharePoint to sync locally so can't make any of those adjustments from that other article. So if we have really important contracts or spreadsheets, there is nothing to prevent 2 people from trying to edit it at the same time? If we're entering Dollar figures and the heck can we possibly keep an accurate spreadsheet?
If a person can auto-checkout a file when they open it, then auto-check it in when they save it, that will work, else forcing people to do these checkouts and checkins will never, ever happen. It'll be a mess in no time with no one able to open docs because everyone forgot to check it back in.
I understand your worries around enforcing users to check out documents before being able to edit. Creating awareness by educating your end users in this case is really important. On the other hand I think Office 365 makes it quite easy for users to reach out to each other (using Teams Chat / Skype for Business integration) when they find out a document is still checked out by one of their colleagues. As a last resort Administrators always have the option to undo a checkout to unlock the file for editing.
