This week, a friend asked me for my thoughts on a really interesting question: should you enable the "require check out before editing" feature in MOSS 2007. The feature is a really good one if version conflicts are a business concern - by requiring check out before a user can edit a document, you completely eliminate the risk of accidentally overriding another editors comments with your own. But, the feature has some really annoying user experience implications ...
Let's say that you are building a new document library and you are migrating content from an existing file share or another site to launch your new site. In this scenario, don't turn on Require Check Out because when you do, all of your documents will "land" as checked out if there is any required metadata and you will not be able to "bulk edit" using edit in datasheet.
After your initial content migration and metadata assignments are complete, think carefully about turning this feature because it will prevent users from easily doing any "bulk editing" of metadata going forward.
However, if your document library will have lots of people editing documents and you are concerned about version conflicts, then go ahead and enable the feature, understanding that you will now be unable to easily edit metadata in bulk without at least temporarily disabling the feature. I've personally accidentally over-ridden someone else's comments because I failed to check out a document before editing so I can speak from personal experience - it's much better to have this feature enabled if lots of people are working on the same set of documents and the need to "bulk edit" metadata is minimal. However, even in this scenario, you can minimize the impact of having the feature disabled if you make sure that document versioning is enabled.
If your document library is only updated by a few people who will typically not edit the same document at the same time, then I usually don't recommend enabling the feature at all. The risk of editing conflicts is smaller than the incredibly frustrating user experience required to check out a document every time you want to make a minor change to an attribute or even the document itself.
As always, the answer is never black or white - it depends on the business problem you are trying to solve. If you live in the "in between" world - your scenario doesn't exactly match either of the two I described, you are probably going to be OK with leaving the "require check out" button disabled but to be safe, you should enable version control.
Hanley is an independent consultant and president of her own firm, Susan Hanley LLC, where she specializes in the design and development of portal solutions and knowledge management consulting.
She is co-author of Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration. Read a free chapter of the book.
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Yes, definitely a double
Yes, definitely a double edged sword. Hard for users to get used to not just clicking on a document and editing it. So many times their changes don't get saved b/c they opened a doc in read only mode instead of edit...
Turn it on
We've identified having it enabled as a best practice and modified our provisioning process to enable it by default. In the event that people are doing bulk uploads or need to mass modify metadata, we instruct them to temporarily disable the feature, do the work, then turn it back on. Better safe than sorry!
Fixed by Publishing Feature
If you have Publishing enabled on your site, you can just go to the Content & Structure page, go to the library in question, select all, and do a bulk check-in.
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