Mimic OneDrive's local/remote file locking

[borconi]

Hi all.

First of all I will like to highlight that this is not a bug, it is more of an enhancement / development request / idea.
I have recently adopted ownCloud on a dedicated server and started moving my clients away from Office 365 to ownCloud, especially those who where very unhappy with Microsoft for various reasons. However there is one big feature which was included in Onedrive and Onedrive for business and it's kind'a lacking in ownClound and this is the prevention of simultaneous edit of documents. I have posted a bug report regarding webdav locking ( owncloud/core#10474 ) which partially solves the problem, the downside with that is:
a) It is quite slow
b) due to Office webdav broken client user is asked each time to press the OK button on his credentials when opening a page.

The Onedrive sync client was able to mark a LOCAL file as being edited, when somebody else started editing the file locally. I assume this worked like propagating the lock file or similar.
Now I'm totally aware of the downsides of that (can get blocked, can be delayed. etc, etc - so I know it is bad) but most of the small business with want to have this working. I know we should try to educate them about versioning and the right way of doing things, but most of the users are simple persons no it skills, for whom even installing a new software means a challenge, and if facebook changed the layout they call it support.... :) I hope you understand what I mean.

So to cut my notes shorter, is there any way to have a client (even if it is a forked version) of the current Windows desktop client which can produce the same effect. I think covering Word, Excel and PP files will be more then enough.

I'm confident that having a feature like this will increase the popularity of ownCloud and probably it can become a strong competitor of Office 365, especially in industries where data privacy is a concern.

Thank you.

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[kaplandani]

I agree it's a good feature and add the little marks on the files and folder regarding the sync status and it would be prefect.

[borconi]

One small side note, which can be used as and incentive, I'm willing to donate £100 for a sync client which can successfully sync the lock files.

[guruz]

CC @MTRichards

[borconi]

Just wondering if there is any improvement on this.... the £100 is still available.

[guruz]

FYI @jturcotte @dragotin @ogoffart

[scolebrook]

@borconi I'm curious about how MS deal with a couple of tricky scenarios in their implementation of OneDrive. Perhaps you know the answers to one or more of these.

How do they handle the situation where a user is offline and starts editing a document that gets edited by someone else before they get back online (e.g., on a long distance flight)? You end up with two different versions of the file. How does it handle that conflict?

Similarly, how does it handle a situation where someone is editing a file and a lock has been propagated, but you go offline before they finish? Are you prevented from editing the file until you are online again and the lock can be removed?

Lastly, what happens if someone is editing a file (lock is propagated), they save it (and the save is synced) but they put their laptop to sleep before closing the file? I assume the lock is still in place because the file is still open. Does the lock timeout at some point or is everyone prevented from editing the file until the user wakes their laptop up, closes the file in question AND is online for the lock to be cleared?

This is a very tough problem to solve and I'm curious how MS deal with these scenarios, assuming they have chosen to deal with them at all.

[borconi]

@scolebrook to be 100% honest I forgot about this topic (over 1 year old now) and I have recently moved my clients from a self maintained server to BOX, but even so I think there is mileage in this and I'm a man of my word so if somebody can get this working still happy to reward as promised.

Now more to the subject. Your question/points are good and valid, and in whole honesty I don't have the answer. I will have to dig into it myself and do some trials and fails before I can answer it. Scratching my head I do recall some problems prior to moving to OwnCloud, where one of the users always switched of his computer while he still had his files opened, which usually caused others not to be able to overwrite the file (aka keeping the file locked), and the others had to save a "copy" of the file.... this was one of the reasons (between others) why we dropped OneDrive back at the time....

Like said I need to do some more testing, but when PC is switched of (or offline if that matters) and the file remained open from an online sessions that will stay like that.

Now I know this is slightly OFF topic and it's not OneDrive but BOX has a quite nice approach. The BOX approach is that it will give you a warning if the file is locked, and also gives you the possibility to UNLOCK it (ignoring previous lock). In case you have conflicts (because of simultan edit or being offline or so) it falls back gracefully to a local conflicting version of the file. This would be and IDEAL solution, the only shortcoming is that you need to right click on a document and manually LOCK it, then you open it and start edit it.

IMHO getting the the best of both worlds (Onedrive and BOX) will be a winning solution.

[scolebrook]

If Box was able to monitor files to detect when they were opened by processes other than itself and propagate locks automatically then it sounds like it'd be a great solution. Giving users a way to override the lock then becomes a training issue of when it's appropriate to do that. And failing back to conflict files as we have now is a good way to go.

For those who are online all the time, I'm looking forward to LibreOffice Online implementing collaborative editing but I have lots of users who are frequently offline and sometimes offline for days or weeks at a time. For those guys having a soft locking capability like Box's implementation could be good. Anything that stops a user working with a file and requires admin involvement is baaaaaad!

[guruz]

Server has support now for LOCK WebDAV call
owncloud/core#31651