Lock message in office files for the same person

Keywords: Signals Notebook, Office restriction, Lock message, unable to edit, Office locked, office issue, office concerns, office locked, office timeout

Issue: User (XYZ) receives a lock message saying (XYZ has kept the file open) while opening a excel file. The file is already closed within the system both online and in desktop but still the pop-up window comes.

Solution:

This behavior of MS Office files is generally seen when files are updated or accessed simultaneously, due to a crash, timeout, child session lock, or computer shutdown

The lock exists to prevent overwriting. However, if a user misses to close their connection properly, which is happening in the excel desktop application and not in Signals Notebook itself, the desktop client keeps sending Signals notebook essentially a ping that they are still active and inhibits the user to open it. 

In such case Signals application lock will be freed after 30 mins and MS Office files lock after 300 mins, if there are no leftover processes or locked files in the system.

Below are few best practices to avoid this behavior of MS Office files:

1. While working on the MS Office files (excel, word, ppt etc.) and updating them make sure they are saved and closed frequently.
2. In case the Excel file is blocked, and you are unable to perform any activity wait for 300 mins (this is the timeout period for MS Office files) and post that see if the file is freed.
3. Close the Excel application fully. Do not leave any excel instances running on the client machine.
4. Confirm there are no Excel processes running in the background in the task manager. If there are any end them.
5. Make sure there is no locked local copy leftover in your system.

Below are also few case scenarios when multiple people try updating the MS office file and its response to it: Signals Notebook allows users to simultaneously edit MS Office files as described below.

Let us suppose two users, User 1 and User 2, are opening and editing the same document using Office Online or Desktop Office. Following are the possible scenarios:

Note: Please note that the timeout for releasing the lock on an inactive Office document is 300 minutes, after that the session will be out and the document gets released.