Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online with Forced Checkout and Synced Folders
I am afraid you have not searched in the right places... ;-)
For the official Microsoft statement, look for "Libraries with Checkout" in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3125202/restrictions-and-limitations-when-you-sync-files-and-folders
A couple of threads in this community are the following:
- https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/Read-Only-Padlock-Icon-files-OFDB-17-3-6743-1212/m-p/38428#M952
- https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/OneDrive-for-Business/Onedrive-readonly-green-locks/m-p/39365#M981
But there are others.
In these threads, of course, are discussed several reasons for the green locks, not only mandatory checkouts.
Hope it helps...
Anytime you turn any required anything on your library sync becomes read only and there is no way around it. Adding required meta data column, poof, read only sync. etc.
Your alternative would be to train folks to manually use the check-out and in feature on a file when they edit it to add comments or investigate using a SharePoint workflow and or preferably a Flow to do some kind of workflow to reach out for comments possibly on files that they edit? That could be an alternative to the situation instead of forcing the users to check-out and in all the time.
Use of version history etc. as well. as Co-Auth could be a good solution here assuming these are office files but if not then that's out of the question.
So what do you mean by Trusted and tracked collaboration? With audit logs and version history you can see who changed what so guess I'm confused personally at the end goal if maybe you could expand on that a little bit.
- I've only used Flows a little, but will look into it as an alternative for providing comments to checked in files. I also wanted to avoid folks inadvertently clobbering each other's changes, and the check out/check in process seemed like a reasonable way of preventing that from occurring.
Walter Pelowski Did you find a solution for this in Flow? I have users with similar needs of tracking comments but are being frustrated by the issues discussed in this thread. If Flow could be leveraged to gather comments so that the require check-out could be removed it would be very beneficial.
BRETT COX, sorry, I have not. I looked at it a little but I am not proficient with Flow yet and we don't have anyone here who is. It's another technology that would take me a while to figure out how to do this. While I have seen some things about how to prompt users for file "Comments" via a flow, (which would allow me to turn off the Force I still don't like the idea that changes to a file could be inadvertently overwritten without the "Require Check Out" process. I don't think there is any way of addressing that issue with a Flow.
For now at least I think I may error on the side of...
- User training for now about how the Require Check Out Document Library setting works and that it doesn't really work if you want to edit the files in a synced local folder. (Because the files remain read-only.)
- Hope that at some point OneDrive gets more feature-rich and can allow files to be modified on a Forced Checkout library when the file is indeed checked out.
If we had a larger team for this project I would probably decide to pursue the Flow route, but for now, it's easier for us to keep the "Require Check Out" option on, get comments, and unfortunately have to go through a more complicated workflow of re-uploading the changed files that does not involve using the much more convenient synced local library.
So one of the things we wanted to do on the BI Team is be more purposeful about when we modified our PowerBI PBIX files. The force checkout also prompts for a version and a comment when people check things in. Maybe there are other ways of accomplishing this (that I don't know of or haven't found yet) but we wanted to...
- Know when changes were made, by whom, and for what purpose.
(Version history alone does parts A and B but not C.) - Know when someone was working on a report/series of reports so that another person wouldn't clobber the other person's work afterwards.
(Without a native integration between PowerBI and SharePoint yet we couldn't just "edit the file in place.") - Allow us to revert back to a known-quantity/state-of-being when needed. (Requires all of #1.)
FWIW, I tried to just encourage/cajole folks into adding comments to files, but when it's all done via a synced library with no-prompts, I think people would end up modifying a file without even being conscious of the fact that they just created a new version in the document library.
https://www.screencast.com/t/qoAfNvMqWg.
Like I said, there may be other ways of accomplishing these goals, but by forcing a checkout of the files and prompting for a comment on check-in, it seems to have solved most of our issues but simultaneously created another one when there is a different workflow to check-out and check-in than folks are used to using.
Hopefully that makes some sense as to why it was enabled. If there were other/better ways of accomplishing these goals that you know of, I'm all ears.
- Know when changes were made, by whom, and for what purpose.
