Today's best practices recommendation, brought to you by Mindsharp via the Power End User course I attended last month, has to do with why you should require check out in your document libraries, and how to go about doing so.
The reason that it's recommended that you require check out on the documents in your library is that, unless you do so, multiple users will be able to check out and edit a single document at the same time*, and without any indication that another user is already editing the same document. What do you think happens if two people are making changes to the same document at the same time? If you said, "whoever saves first wins," give yourself a gold star.
Such headaches can be avoided by requiring that users check out a document from a library before making changes. Don't worry, if someone has checked out a given document and is in the process of making changes, a read-only version can still be accessed by other users.
Is it a complicated or laborious process to set up a document library to require check out? Not at all. In fact, setting up a document library to require check out is as simple as selecting a single radio button in the library settings:
To navigate to the above setting, from within the library itself, first select Document Library Settings from the Settings dropdown, then select the Versioning Settings hyperlink under the General Settings header. From there, you'll be presented with the setting options page for the library, and you'll notice that the last option is Require Check Out. Once you're here, all you need to do is switch the defaulted Require Check Out radio button selection from No to Yes (as pictured above), click OK at the bottom of the page, and you're all set.
* Please see Kyle Bakker's helpful comment below for an instructive clarification of this process.
Posted
Sep 08 2008, 03:35 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.