Question

Strange behavior with Office Online after 10.3.1 upgrade

Forms

Updated August 3, 2018

asked on July 27, 2018 • Show version history

Ever since we upgraded our system to 10.3.1, we have been experiencing issues with how Office documents are opening using Microsoft Office Online.

Specifically, when a user tries to open a document for editing, the user is prompted to use the Microsoft Office Add-In, whereas if the user tries to simply view a document, the document opens in Microsoft Office Online, however when the user chooses to Edit in Browser, this button is greyed out and cannot be used. Further, if I try clicking within the open document and try to make changes, I get a prompt saying the document was opened as read-only and cannot be changed, and the Enable Editing button is also greyed out.

The very weird thing is that some documents can be edited (i.e. the Edit in Browser button is active), and it seems to be available to any documents that I have created after the upgrade.

Some of the things I have looked at to this point:
1) The permissions to a document that could be edited versus one that couldn't were identical (I have full Admin permissions on both).

2) Looking at user permissions, regardless of who is logged on to the specific computer:
a. If the user has "Open in Browser" set in their Display Options within Laserfiche, it will try to open the document within Office Online each time, however with the Edit in Browser button greyed out.
b. If the user has "Download electric file" set here, it will try to open the document using the Office Add-In. However, even if the Add-In is configured and working properly under one user profile on that machine, the installation still needs to be done under all user profiles.

3) Remembering this issue was not happening in 10.3, I tried both downgrading from 10.3.1 to 10.3, as well as reverting to the snapshot I took prior to upgrading to 10.3.1, but neither of these fixed the problem, which leads me to think the problem *may* have been there previously.

4) I tried uninstalling the Add-In completely (thinking it might default to Office Online), but this wasn't the case.

5) I tried disabling the Chrome Laserfiche extension, but if the registry setting was set to "Download electronic file", I would get prompted to download the Laserfiche Add-In (although this appears to be an expected behavior).

So I have two questions here:

1) Is it default behavior to have an Office file open (using the Edit button) using the Office Add-In? My thought is that if Office Online has been turned on and configured, an Office file should open for editing this way each and every time, and a user should never be prompted to install or use the Add-In.

2) Is there a possible behavior within Office Online that would set all documents to open normally, and not read-only? Seeing as this issue happens with almost all documents, I get the feeling there might be a configuration setting in Office Online (whether application or registry) that might change this behavior.

If anyone might have thoughts on things to try here, I would love to switch to Microsoft Office Online completely and move away from the Add-In, as the Edit in Browser feature works very well once it's configured properly!

Marty Gaffney - Network Technician
Town of Okotoks

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Replies

replied on July 27, 2018 • Show version history

Hi Marty,

You are correct that currently 'Edit' launches the Office plug-in and 'View' opens the document viewer (at which point you can still 'Edit' through the browser). As you note that's not an intuitive flow, and we're already taking steps to make that clearer in the next version. Basically the view vs edit option will go away in general, it'll always open in the document viewer, and then you can choose whether to edit it in browser through Office Online or download to edit locally through the Office Plug-in. That's not until the next version though.

Note that opening in 'view' mode itself does not make it read-only, however there are some other factors that can. For example, if a user is currently updating Laserfiche fields or pages of the document, it will get flagged as read-only, even if co-authoring is enabled on the office document itself. This is another thing that we're currently updating in the internals. That said, I wouldn't expect that to come up all the time - is it possible that other items are interacting with and locking the documents, such as Workflow processes?

I will say that none of these should have notably changed between 10.3 and 10.3.1. There may be some nuance that could explain the difference you are seeing, but no major changes should have occurred there.

In general, I'm glad to hear that the Office Online functionality is working well for you in general (when it's clear to the user what's going on!) and I'm looking forward to seeing if the changes that were making will aid in that process.

Please let me know if you'd be interested in participating in a user study to help validate these changes we are making!

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replied on August 3, 2018

We've opened a case with support for this issue for Marty.

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replied on July 27, 2018

Hey:

First off, definitely count me in for participating in the User Study, as we are hoping to use this quite a bit point forward!

Although we had Co-Authoring turned on at first, we decided to turn it off, as we will be using Laserfiche predominantly with records, and we didn't want to have too many versions of documents as a result. That said, could it be because Co-Authoring was turned off that we're unable to use the Edit in Browser feature going forward? Or could there be something on the document itself that enables it for co-authoring that may need to be switched off? It seems like there is a setting associated with the document/environment/repository that makes Office Online think it needs to open the document in read-only mode.

I have tried this with a number of different documents in a couple of our repositories, and I can confirm that these documents were not open at the time for editing elsewhere.

Thanks for your assistance with this!

Marty

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replied on July 30, 2018

Hi Marty,

It's hard to tell exactly why the documents are showing up as read-only from the thread here, but it doesn't sound like it's behaving quite like it's supposed to. Can you have your VAR open up a support case on this so we can look more closely at it? Please feel free to include my name with the submission. I've also passed along this post to our user experience group for their user studies.

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Strange behavior with Office Online after 10.3.1 upgrade

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