Forum Discussion
Files On-demand + Require check out = useless?
stenci Something is missing here because the behavior that is being experienced does not match up with a typical behavior of what Microsoft typically builds/provides.
First I apologize, I assumed the above and didn't fully ask all the questions I should have asked. Which made me think... I have the One Drive client at hand I can confirm that I can go through the full check in/check out process and I couldn't. It appears that this has been not considered a feature to implement for a while in fact:
I still stand by my statement that the functionality is not useless. Because it will still allow you to pull down the contents locally - if there is a need to present files w/o a stable connection back to O365. Now there could be better indicators where the OneDrive client communicates back to the user that they will not be able to make changes and save the file back to O365.
So, back to you... why is the feature to checkin/out via the OneDrive client needed? Maybe fully talking this through may warrant reposting this feature on User Voice to get Microsoft to implement.
stenci Lets start here "prevents files from being edited" this is purpose of checkout, one user checks out the document to edit so that they can have exclusive control of editing the document while it is checked out. They check it in, a different person may check it out or they may check it out again for further edits. Secondary purpose, it acts as a transaction start and end - while it is checked out there is a version maintained on the server that can be read without the changes that are being made to the document. Checking in closes that transaction and makes all the changes available to read.
Is it useless? Absolutely not - it is very useful in publishing scenarios. Check out, make changes, check in, get approval of changes, publish major version.
With your situation in Notepad, this is an application Microsoft produces that is not aware of the functions in SharePoint/OneDrive so it doesn't know when a check out/in is required and you experience the problems you described. So as long as you keep this in mind you can use Notepad, you have to go through the process to check out/in through OneDrive Sync or Web UI. There are other software that won't check for this process, so you just have to be aware of that. Most of Microsoft's products are aware and even some third party software is (Adobe Suite I believe is aware of this too).
Maybe it would be good to seek out some site administration training for SharePoint? Topics like this should be covered there.
(deleted because it was the previous post duplicated)