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.
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.
Walter PelowskiThanks for all the fantastic info you've collected here in this thread. Your post was the first relevant result that came up in a web-search.
Depending on how sophisticated you want to get with Flow (PowerAutomate), all you should need to do is create an 'Automated' flow that fires whenever certain SharePoint files are edited (or created, depending). You can then simply send an e-mail reminder to the creator or editor of the file (or to an admin) noting that the file requires comments. A more sophisticated version might sleep for a few minutes, and then re-check to see whether the (soft-)required fields have been filled in, and send an e-mail if not. If you have access to Flows and you'd like to message me or reply here, I can give a little more detail.
Somewhat related to this is how requiring metadata via SharePoint causes the affected OneDrive files to become readonly. I believe MS developers did this because OneDrive doesn't have good enough integration with SharePoint to allow this just yet. I'm not sure if a solution to the main issue being discussed here will come out of progress on this related subject, but here's the https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/913522-onedrive-on-windows/suggestions/17864110-enable-sync-client-to-allow-editable-synching-of-t, which would allow OneDrive to reflect SharePoint metadata via Windows' file-explorer. Please consider voting on this if you haven't already.
To any Microsoft reps who pass by this thread: I was really hoping that checking out files would allow them to be written locally via OneDrive, using whatever applications and add-ons a user might like. I'd been looking into a way to make sure that no two users could edit files in same directory until the other was finished, in order to prevent problems from simultaneous editing of files that contain cross-references (as a simple example, Word documents and Excel sheets can refer to oneanother in this way, so edits to such interlinked files should in turn be atomic. There are numerous examples of non-Office project-files that are similar e.g. shapefiles (.shp) since they are accompanied with little database-files and projection-definitions (.prj) that sit in the same directory. There is no simple way to handle this situation for non-Office files...).
