Some Customers have experienced issues with Word documents locking, even though no user appears to have the Word document open. This has been a particularly difficult issue for our team to deal with as it happens inconsistently, with a couple of Customers experiencing this issue more frequently.

While our team is also working with Microsoft to understand the issue, as it is a known issue that is experienced inconsistently when opening MS Word documents on SharePoint, unfortunately as this is a known issue Microsoft has not uncovered any solutions to date.

In effort to help reduce the level of impact, our team has implemented an unlock button in the Edit Properties and Workflow drop down options in Report Manager Draft page to force unlock reports that are being reported as locked for editing by other users. User who is locking the file is also identified in the Edit Properties and Workflow dialogs.

PLEASE NOTE: in the event that a user does have the report document open and the 'unlock' button is triggered, unlocking may result in loss of data entered by the user locking the file if changes made to the file were not saved. ALWAYS confirm with the user who  reported the document locked BEFORE pressing the 'unlock' button.

 Related Articles:

1. Contributor - Editing Report Properties
2. Contributor - Starting a Workflow