Office Documents "converting" themselves to READ-ONLY

[Donnice Scrimsh]

We currently are on TRIM Desktop 6.25 1332

We have been wrestling with a strange phenomenon for several months and have been unable to wrap are arms around it.   Users will have a document open and then randomly the document will turn into a READ-ONLY status.  It tends to happen primarily with WORD documents but has also happened with Excel as well.   There seems to be no rhyme or reason for this behavior, it is very sporadic and cannot be replicated "at will".  Network outages have been ruled out.  Noted below is the common scenario.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

1. User checks out document to edit (verified it was not in READ-ONLY status)

2. User made several edits, periodically saving document, (may have been open for several hours)

3. User went to save document again as he had been doing throughout the day, the document was now in  READ-ONLY status, and the user was then required to save the “new” record into TRIM.

4. Once the Read-Only record was saved as a new record the original was automatically “released” from offline records and was no longer checked out.  The only record then checked out was the copy made from the Read-Only.

It appears that something causes some sort of loss of connectivity and returns the original document into TRIM leaving the users a “copy”.  

[Strider_1]

I've experienced the same thing with 6.2.4 #1240.

Cannot get a handle on it... only happens intermittently...no ability to replicate...

All thoughts/help greatly appreciated.

[EWillsey]

Are you using Word 2003?

[Mel Marlow]

Are the Excel spreadsheets setup as "Shared Workbooks"?

[James_Aardvark]

You know we had the same error last year.  We were running 6.2.5 Windows 7 and Office 2007.  We upgraded to 7.10 and the problem magically disappeared.

My advice is to upgrade asap.  Make sure you have integration working and upgrade applications/server (SQL2008 R2) at the same time.  It's quite a change but infinitely more stable.

All the best

[Rich_Kid]

Where is the location of the users Offline records??

is it on a network drive or does it point to their local c: drive??

if they use a network drive, configure the client to check out to a local drive and see if that makes any diffference.

what could be happening is the network drive is briefly lost and trim sets the document to be checked back in so you cant update it, only save a new record.

[Donnice Scrimsh]

Their local C:/ drive is where we have them configured.   Thanks for the input

[Donnice Scrimsh]

The majority of the records are WORD, but occasionally Excel records fall victim as well but not necessarily of the "Shared" variety.

[Donnice Scrimsh]

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@EWillsey wrote:

Are you using Word 2003?

---

We currently are on 2007, however many of the "legacy" records are 2003

[LGTRIMMER]

Hi,

We have this issue regularly . I've also noticed at the time this problem arises, I receive an autogenerated email from the the server containing the following information.

_______________

TRIM Workgroup Server running on trim01 reported the following message:

 Error : BL  User: TRIM01 - trimservices Cannot read the file 'E:\BL\1\11w\c000t97f.doc'. The system cannot find the file specified. (0x00000002).

This E-mail Message has been automatically generated by TRIM Context (trim01.).

_________________

What does this mean and why has it occured?

Is there a resolution for this problem?

Any assistanc is much appreciated.

Jo

[Novice008]

In our office, we refer to these as "broken" documents.  When you save them, you now have two documents that really belong together.  They can be merged together when this happens.  Ir you want to email me, I can share with you the instructions to do this.

But when I placed this posting to the forum, Erik Willsey, Honored Contributor, responded this way (which made sense to me)...

"If you open Word, Windows assigns it a process ID.  When you open a file the Windows Process ID will be linked to that document.  Applications on your computer can then see "word is locking this file". 

If you lose your network connection when an application is interrogating the process, it may show that it's no longer locked.  Later the application may get its' lock back, maybe not.  Either way, TRIMWatcher is now confused.

TRIMWatcher gets confused if TRIM goes down as well.

TRIM can often be confusing/confused.  :)"

I found this information interesting because I had never heard of it before.  I have no resolution for you, but perhaps one of the other experts here can help.

Good luck.

[Poppitoah87]

Hi Novice008,

With reference to your answer, how do you merge 2 documents together?

Thanks heaps.