Hi all,
I may be barking up the wrong tree here, if so, I do apologise.
Background - We have been working on and have been partially successful in creating a document management system to fit our business needs by integrating Salesforce (front-end/workflows/etc) with SharePoint online (file storage/metadata/access permissions/etc). This is considered largely successful.
Unresolved Behaviour - We see examples of several states of errors reported when attempting to change the status of a file residing in SPO (or push metadata updates to the file). In our understanding, this is predominately due to SPO locking the file (e.g. checked out, or just locked for a different reason) despite all sessions to the file being closed (either web app or desktop app).
We have some ability to gather diag data in each case and do have various examples, one of which is shown below:
{"error":{"code":"-2147018894, Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException","message":{"lang":"en-US","value":"The file \"https://ourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/clientdocs/Controlled Documents/AWSTest23Aug a0I1X00000iHhfmUAC.docx\" is locked for shared use by email address removed for privacy reasons."}}}
What we see in similar test examples is one of the following:
1.) File stays locked for several hrs after the last session is terminated. and...
a) it unlocks itself after several hours of inactivity.
b) it doesn't unlock itself even after 24hrs++ and requires admin intervention to release the lock.
2.) In the cases where the file is locked, pushing document status changes or metadata updates from the front end to the back end understandably results in no state change or meta updates to the file residing in the SPO library (e.g. out of sync metadata states between front end and back end).
There are other scenarios as well, but this describes our primary issue with the file status behaviour.
In testing, it has been reported that this behaviour gets worse during certain times of day (e.g. more documents/files are affected at specific times, and/or the locked states remain for longer), typically around mid-day to mid or late afternoon, perhaps suggesting a processing queue scenario (speculating here).
In respect of our setup, the SPO library is configured for No content approval, No versioning and No checkout required to edit. The objective is to use the SPO library as a filing cabinet, only applying permissions at the site/library for limiting access to necessary users/groups. All other controls are managed through Salesforce.
I have reached out to MS 1st and 2nd line support, but the feedback is that this is out of their scope and that I should reach out to the MS Dev team (at a cost).......We are prepared to explore this avenue, but it was not made clear whom specifically we should be targeting.
Hence this message reaching out to the dev community for a potential lead.
Is anyone aware of a comms path to the MS dev side to allow us to engage and see where that avenue leads?
many thanks in advance and apologies for the lengthy post.
George
