Scenario:
We have recently recognized an influx of issues regarding Office 2013/Office 2016 and saving/checking out Office files to SharePoint Online. This issue can be ambiguous and have many causes but we want to raise awareness that WAN accelerators, such as RiverBed, have been involved in multiple of our recent cases.
WAN accelerators are intended to optimize traffic but if misconfiguration or errors are occurring, this can cause delays and/or the inability to save and check out Office files to SharePoint. Due to the design of acceleration and modification of TCP packets, if not done properly it cause expected errors for Office.
Errors:
Error messages we have seen connect directly to this issue have been:
- The file “http://domain….” is checked out for editing by user ‘ ‘
- The file “filename.xlsx” has been locked for editing by ‘ ‘
- ” Upload failed” – You may notice you are locked out of the file for extended durations (minutes to hours while you know no other user is in the file)
What to do:
Testing the removal/bypassing of WAN accelerators (such as modifying the hosts file) is critical to early troubleshooting. If a change in behavior is found after removing these acceleration services, engage your WAN acceleration team to investigate further.
If the issue is still present after removal of WAN acceleration services, continue with normal troubleshooting which typically involves simplification of environment (both local machine and network), review of networking logs (Fiddler/Netmon), and review of ULS logs on the SharePoint side (ULS would be available to SharePoint On-Premise users but not available to the public for SharePoint Online).
As noted, there can be many causes for this issue but wanted to let you know of a topic hitting our radar a bit more frequently and then ideas for further troubleshooting in chance WAN acceleration is not the cause.
Dustin