Office plugin Fail-Safe

asked on May 16, 2018

Hi All,

We would like a confirmation regarding a fail-safe method with office documents opened from Laserfiche?

There has been an instance where a user has opened a file from LF (Excel Document) and made changes to the file and closed. Upon checking the changes within the file after it was closed, there was none saved and after auditing the file, it did not show any "Write E-File Contents" tag anywhere and only "Viewed".

Although, when checking the Temp folder for that user, the file was there with the changes? There were two instances of the file in the user's Temp Folder, one contained the changes and the other did not.

When another user from the company wanted to open that file from within Laserfiche the following prompt was displayed:

The thing is though, the file was not opened by the original user and the only reason the above was displayed was that the Office Plugin was running.

When I wanted to test this, and opened the file to confirm the issue, the file opened without any issues but it was blank, which then I noticed the Laserfiche Office Plugin was not running on my Excel session. Upon switching that back on, and trying to re-open the file, I then received the above Screenshot as well.

We would like to know if the user has an electronic document opened from Laserfiche that for some reason (and please advise why that would be the case) the plugin does not load, how does Laserfiche then advise that the connection is lost? What are the prompts to advise that the file is no longer associated/connected to the repository? What are the Fail-Safe options available as users do not know about the Temp folder?

If there are prompts, can you advise when the user would be advised of these, especially if the Office Plugin is not loaded?

Any further questions, please let me know and I will be more than happy to add.

The client is concerned that if this occurs again, we may lose the Temp file which will mean the loss of documentation that was worked on for hours/days as some files are left opened for a long period of time.

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replied on May 16, 2018

If office plugin is loaded, In 10.2, office plugin prompts a message to people if the file is no longer associated/connected to the repository, but it seems people may not realize the potential data loss (i mean the change is not saved back to repository). so we add a method in 10.3 to prevent users from closing the document unless they saves the document as a local document.

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View 9 previous replies

replied on May 16, 2018 • Show version history

Hi Huazhen,

The client is currently on 10.3.0, is this option available on this version? or does it need to be 10.3.1?

If it is available on 10.3.0, would the user have received that prompt and do they have the option to cancel that? which means then, the data is lost?

Thank you

Ziad

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replied on May 17, 2018

Hi Huazhen,

Just following up on this, please advise.

Thank you

Ziad

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replied on May 18, 2018 • Show version history

We have had several reports of the same issue - can someone confirm if 10.3.1 is required to resolve this?

Currently we have a client running 10.2.0 who are seeing that the "Overwrite" and "Save as New Version" options are missing from the Laserfiche ribbon and we suspected that this was resulting in lost changes due to the way they were forced to save changes. There is a hotfix available for 10.2.1 which apparently resolves the missing ribbon items issue but we're now thinking that the 10.3.1 upgrade would be the way to go as the primary issue is users losing changes in Excel documents.

It would help if we could get a definitive answer on this so we can decide whether to go for a hotfixed 10.2.1 (the hotfix is NOT included in 10.3.1 apparently) or go right up to 10.3.1.

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replied on May 22, 2018

Thanks for your patience. The method is added in 10.3, not updated in 10.3.1. The method works if the connection works when opening the document, but lost later. It is not applied to the case if the document is not opened with a connection. ("Overwrite" and "Save as New Version" option is missing from Laserfiche ribbon when opening). So there is enhancement for us to do that. Could you kindly instruct us which hotfix resolves your issue? We will double check with the 10.3.

If you have idea about preventing losing changes, please feel free to share it. thank you

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replied on May 23, 2018

Hi Huazhen - thanks for the update.

Just to be clear then, should we upgrade the client to 10.3.1 on the basis that this version includes the method added in 10.3.1?

Of the two issues (missing ribbon items vs lost changes) then we would rather go with the version which resolves the latter and accept that the missing ribbon items issue will be resolved in a future release (10.4 reportedly)

Thanks,

Nigel.

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replied on May 23, 2018

Hi Huazhen,

Just to add to Nigel's response, it would be a great option to make sure the user is aware the ribbon was not loaded when a file is opened from Laserfiche.

As some users do not usually check / look and work on documents once opened, it is hard to advise them that they need to keep an eye on the ribbon and make sure the plugin is available.

thank you

Ziad

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replied on May 27, 2018 • Show version history

Hi NiGel&Ziad,

From our test, 10.3.1 prevents the change to be lost when the office integration is disconnected. People have a chance to save them into their workstation.

For the missing ribbon, thanks for your idea. We'll take a look at in 10.4. #90705 for a reference.

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replied on May 30, 2018

Just a quick update - we upgraded to 10.3.1 over the weekend and the ribbon items returned so that seems to be resolved yet. It's too early to say if the lost changes issue remains but I've not heard any reports just yet.

The upgrade does seem to have introduced a new issue though whereby the saving process takes significantly longer (>15 seconds) when text extraction is enabled. With text extraction disabled the save process completes instantly.

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replied on March 21, 2019

Hi Nigel, did the lost changes issue remain after your 10.3.1 upgrade? We are still on 10.2 and are having some problems with this. Thanks in advance - hoping for positive news!

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replied on March 25, 2019

Hi Kirsty,

The customer reported that the incidence of lost changes was much less, but still occurred sporadically.

The issue with the ribbon items (Save as New Version, Overwrite and the Metadata button) not appearing though seems to have come back in 10.4, but only since they upgraded to Office 2016. It could be down to other factors but the symptoms are identical.

Nigel.

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replied on March 25, 2019

Okay, thank you for the update.

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replied on September 17, 2019

We are having this issue and we are on the latest 10.4.

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