I am having a major issue with co-authoring the Microsoft Word documents in SharePoint 2013. It is difficult to reproduce the original issue but, here is a scenario:
- Three different users, User A, B, and C, are working on a document in a document library at the same time. (User A has Office 2013 while others have 2010 installed in their workstations.)
- User A saves her work, closes her session, and assumes that her changes were uploaded to the server.
- When User A opens the document at a later time, she gets an older version of the document! Her last updates were not saved to the server.
Things to consider:
- User A can recover her changes from the Autosaved document in her local machine.
- If the document is saved rapidly in succession, the document is does not show "Uploading to the server" message at the bottom of the document. Rather, it shows "Saving AutoRecovery file AS2345...". Sometimes, saving the AutoRecovery file seems to get stuck trying to save the file.
- We turned off auto-save in Word, and it seems to have mitigated the above issue.
It seems like the auto-save functionality of Word is interfering with the upload process during co-authoring. I have tried to get some documentation on the web as to what happens in the back-end during co-authoring, but I was not very successful. If someone could point me in the direction on where I can find information on co-authoring architecture and its relation to auto-save, I would be very grateful. Thank you in advance.