SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

When you have been working with SharePoint for a while, you get a feeling for when an issue is with SharePoint and when its not, and you can generally tell which it is within a few minutes.

So when we started getting reports of users unable to edit documents or save edits back to SharePoint, I immediately though it’s just a single user or a faulty workstation, but when we started getting more and more reports I did begin to wonder it it was a SharePoint issue after all.

The symptoms seemed to be, a user could open a document from SharePoint, edit it and save the edits, but the all subsequent documents would open in [Read-Only] mode, without the normal “Edit Document” message bar appearing in the office client application.

To get back to normal functionality the user would have to close all browser sessions and relaunch, no amount of changing browser or office settings would return office to normal working.

Further investigations showed that almost all the workstations were running Windows 7 and Office 2010, but all had Lync 2013 installed, finally we we tried running an Office 2010 client repair from Windows Control Panel and bingo, normal document editing was resumed.

So once again not a true SharePoint issue, but as the presentation layer SharePoint normally gets the blame.

Happy SharePointing