Locked office Documents on Fileshare

[Inertia]

If an excel or word or other MS office documents are opened by one user, and then another user on the network tries to open them, they get the warning and told they can only open it in read only mode or 'notify' which tells them when the editing of the file is handed over to them.

 

If the person with the file open is or busy on the phone, the person who needs to edit it might not be able to contact them for a while, which can be frustrating.

 

Is there a timeout that could be set where the file on the locking computer will save, and exit after x amount of time if another user is accessing the file and that machine is idle for x time ? This would be useful.

 

And/or how about the locked file having a flashing popup generated by excel that x user is requesting access to the file, do they want to save and exit or not ?

 

Or are there other solutions to this problem?

 

This client is using Office 2010 x86 by the way, if it makes a difference.

 

Thanks

[#Michael]

If an excel or word or other MS office documents are opened by one user, and then another user on the network tries to open them, they get the warning and told they can only open it in read only mode or 'notify' which tells them when the editing of the file is handed over to them.

 

If the person with the file open is or busy on the phone, the person who needs to edit it might not be able to contact them for a while, which can be frustrating.

 

Is there a timeout that could be set where the file on the locking computer will save, and exit after x amount of time if another user is accessing the file and that machine is idle for x time ? This would be useful.

 

And/or how about the locked file having a flashing popup generated by excel that x user is requesting access to the file, do they want to save and exit or not ?

 

Or are there other solutions to this problem?

 

This client is using Office 2010 x86 by the way, if it makes a difference.

 

Thanks

That is where a sharepoint site is quite handy.  It allows for the check out/in ability.  It never leaves documents locked.

[sc302 Veteran]

As an admin you have the ability to kick people out of the document on the file server.  Otherwise you will need to have something like sharepoint or google docs to have multiple people access the doc at the same time and be able to make changes to it.

 

With sharepoint 2013, excel and one note are the only two that can be opened at the same time and users simultaneously be able to input data.  They are able to lock the fields/cells to individual users.  Word is fully open so it is only one user at a time in word.  Sharepoint also give you the ability to be able to check out documents if you are working on them, they are read only to everyone else.

[Anibal P]

What we do is use Sharepoint and make them checkout the file, we still have a few holdouts but it's a better solution IMO