When you have received an error like the following, what can I do?
This can occur for several different reasons but there are some that are much more frequent causes so that is where we will focus for now. Also, a little background information may help. We’ll start with that. When you check out a document, a copy of the latest version is brought to your local workstation meaning the workstation on which you perform the task. It is for this reason that we strongly encourage Users to check in a document as soon as they are done editing it which gets it back on the server.
Reason # 1 - If you start working on a document from a colleagues workstation or another workstation somewhere else in the plant and don’t check it back in, the working copy will reside in the work directory on the other workstation until it is either checked in from that workstation or it is discarded.
Reason #2 – Similar to reason #1, if a document is checked out on your local workstation, say a laptop, and the document doesn’t get checked back in, some time passes and something happens to that workstation and it ends up getting replaced or the drive wiped and reformatted, the information on the drive was likely lost and the software reinstalled, well, that may well look like a different workstation to our software if they renamed the workstation license assignment, yet the document still will show as checked out to the same user.
Reason # 3 – If you are connecting via Terminal Services, there may be a problem with your roaming user profile when it connects through different servers in your “TS farm”.
There are several more potential reasons, but I am confident you would be more interested in how to resolve this so you can access your document.
My suggestion would be to run the File Check utility to see just where the document is checked out. Depending upon the version of our software you are running, it may be under the Tools menu in Desktop. Here is a link to the latest version.
https://downloads.waypointglobal.com/downloads/FileCheck32.EXE
Launch the utility. From the menu bar, select Check\Start as below.
This will present a list of files that are either not where the database thinks they should be or are checked out. The status will show under the column labeled ‘Status.’ You can see the workstation name to which it was checked out in the Workstation column and the complete file path under the File Path column.
If you get a list of files, you can do a File\Save As and name the file as “<YYYY-MM-DD> File Check Results.csv“ and email it to me, please. Either way, please share your results with us.
Our other option is to simply discard this checked out revision. This is done via Document Manager.
To locate the documents, Select File/Open and identify the document titles you need to work on. I noticed the error was in Quality Planner so the documents must be part of a project. If it was one of the fab five (Characteristic List, Characteristic Matrix, Control Plan, Process Flow Diagram and Process FMEA) you will need to select ALL FIVE plus the project MASTER document. See image below. If it isn’t one of the fab five, you can select only the document giving you the message. You can multi-select using the CTRL key and your mouse. Something to remember, all fab five document revisions should be the same.
Once the titles are highlighted, select Open.
This will open the document workspace(s) for the document(s). For each document that is checked out, one at a time, select the checked out revision, then Change Control tab and then select the Discard button near the bottom center. A dialog will ask you to confirm you wish to discard this revision; Yes or No. Then close the document workspace by selecting the lower ‘X’ of the two in the upper right corner (NOT the red one) in the image. You will notice there is a tab open for each of the documents you selected to open in the previous step. Repeat for each of the documents as necessary.
Once all are completed, you should be good to go and no longer receive the message for these documents.
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