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SharePoint 2007: Check-out Check-in feature on documents - some interesting facts worth to know

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This post will elaborate some interesting facts about the check-out feature of documents in SharePoint sites. We have 2 types of Check-out in SharePoint. Short term and Long term.

If you click the drop-down of a document in a Document library and choose “check out”, that is a Long term.
when you just click on the file name, Word opens the document in “Read-Write” mode, it places a Short term checkout on the document. In Office 2003 the short term checkouts is of 10 minutes. However, in 2007 it is changed to 60 minutes.
The short term check-out gets refreshed automatically as long as Word is open. There is no way to force the expiration of a short term checkout.

The discard check-out option available in the drop-down menu of a document library is used only for the long term checkout.
If a user opens a document from a document library in the Read-Write mode (i.e. just by clicking on the file name), then that creates a short-term check-out and no other user can edit the document till the first user closes it. You can find the expiration time in the 'CheckoutExpires' column of the AllDocs table.
It becomes NULL only when the first user close the document.

The interesting part of this behaviour is this. If a user does a short check-out and keeps the client application ‘Word’, open with the document and goes away for the weekend,
then no other user can modify this document till that user returns and closes ‘Word’.
Not even the administrator has the control to get this document back to read-write mode. Interesting huh..

Considering OS specification:

Windows XP with Office 2003 / Office 2007:
Default short term checkout Expire time is 10 minutes.
If the opened document is closed, the lock will be released immediately.
If the application (Winword.exe) crashed then we have to wait for 10 minutes and the lock will expire in 10 minutes

Windows VISTA with Office 2007:
Default short term checkout Expire time is 60 minutes.
If the open document is closed, the lock will be released immediately.
If the application (Winword.exe) crashed then the lock will be released immediately.

More details can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899709