MS Office 2008 and Network Home Folders

[Lucien]

Dear all,

This is my first message here,

I’m a rookie system administrator of a small office composed of Apple computers. All these computers are running Mac OS X 10.5.1. We also have a special (2GB of RAM) Mac Mini that we use as our OS X Server (10.5.1).
Our server is providing basic networking services (Gateway, Firewall, NAT, DHCP, DNS, VPN) and it’s also an Open Directory Master.
Home folders of staff are stored in the server and get mounted on the workstation via AFP (aka Network Home Folder).
Everything is working fine so far.

But here starts my problem : Recently we’ve upgraded to MS Office 2008, and staff began to complain about problems while working with Word and Excel documents, I advised them to use the latest extension .docx or xlsx which seems to be more stable. Unfortunately for me the problems didn’t stop. So I’ve checked it out by myself :

Whenever staff try to open certain documents they get an error message that says “Cannot access ” and click ok. After 2 or 3 attempts the file gets opened.
Another issue is : Right away after closing a document, when staff try to open it again, they get an error message : “ is being used by “another user”. Do you want to make a copy ?”

People from other Apple related forums told me it’s a permission issue but i doubt about that because :
1) I haven’t change anything to the default permission settings used for the Network Home Folder sharepoint.
2) If i use Apple’s iWork, i get no problems, files open fine.

Even the newly released Service Pack 12.1.0 doesn’t fix any of these problems !

I really would like to get rid of these problems with Office ’08 and stop hearing staff complains.

I’m also wondering that i shouldn’t be the only one having these problems since Network Home Folders and Office 2008 are commonly used in business (and my setup is about everything but special).

Have you ever experienced the same issues : how did you solve your problems, any workarounds ? …

Thx a lot in advance !

[topnotchchach]

Nice post.

I have my site with 1000 plus users, running office 2008 “pre-patch” on 10.5.2

Have not seen any of those issues at all.. however… i remember this from office 2004 and office x…

Permissions!

If you look in the applications folder and get info on the office 2008, 2004 or x folder you will notice permissions for three groups. You have to make everyone have read and write… every user other than an administrator(who has read and write) after they quit or save, a prompt will come up asking if you want to save the global temp file, “normal”. That will not happen with you change that folder permissions to read and write(for everyone: staff, everyone, and admin).

I did the same for 2008. The only problem i dont like with 2008 is that it makes you create an identity and asks every user if they want to submit feedback…

Also, that “copy in use” might be a serial number problem…

This has nothing to do with network homes, all thats being saved to the network is the identity and user prefs… Not the actual app.

Hope this helps….

[chefhomer]

In troubleshooting we have done so far on the ‘File is in use by ‘another user’ ‘ error with Office 2008 and Net Homes – we believe we narrowed it down to Spotlight as the cause/application that had the document in use (trying to index it, when it became a new document on the filesystem)

I would be curious to learn if you disable Spotlight searching for the folder you are saving those documents to – does that issue also go away for you?

[rstasel]

ah ha, so you have this issue.

From the Office X and Office 2004 days…. make sure there is a .TemporaryItems folder at the root of the share. So if your User share is /Volumes/Data/Users, make sure to put a .TemporaryItems folder in there, and make it world read/write (777).

That should fix your issues. =)

[chefhomer]

We do have the ‘.TemporaryItems’ folder at the root of the ‘Users’ share – it has not resolved the ‘File in use by ‘another user” error for us.
The only work around that has worked for us in our testing so far is disabling Spotlight indexing of the specific folders in question under the network home dir.

We have seen this error quite often when receiving Word documents as email attachments – especially if you click to open the word doc from the mail window just after receiving it. If you exclude ~/Library/Mail\ Downloads from Spotlight indexing, the attachments open first try with no ‘In use by another user’ error – otherwise if you get the error and wait a minute it will usually open on the 2nd try because spotlight is done with the file.

[PeterC]

How did you control which directories to exclude from spotlight?

[chefhomer]

by adding the folders to System Preferences – SpotLight – Privacy Tab on the client machine

[Lucien]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: chefhomer[/u][p][i]We do have the ‘.TemporaryItems’ folder at the root of the ‘Users’ share – it has not resolved the ‘File in use by ‘another user” error for us.
The only work around that has worked for us in our testing so far is disabling Spotlight indexing of the specific folders in question under the network home dir.

We have seen this error quite often when receiving Word documents as email attachments – especially if you click to open the word doc from the mail window just after receiving it. If you exclude ~/Library/Mail\ Downloads from Spotlight indexing, the attachments open first try with no ‘In use by another user’ error – otherwise if you get the error and wait a minute it will usually open on the 2nd try because spotlight is done with the file.[/i][/QUOTE]

I’m very happy to hear someone who got the same problem as mine and managed to find a solution for it. I was getting a bit desperate to find somebody having the same issue.
According to you chefhomer, this ‘File is being used by ‘another user” error is caused by Spotlight. It appears that I’ve already tried to turn off Spotlight for the concerned folder (home folder share point) in the server but that didn’t fix the problem for me. However I’ve seen that once Spotlight is turned off in the Server, it turns on locally in the workstation. So I will try again by excluding folders from local Spotlight and see if i can get any improvements.

[chefhomer]

Lucien,

Did you try disabling the net home folder paths under the local Spotlight? Did it resolve the ‘in use by another user’ error for you?

We see it a lot with Office Docs received as email attachments – have you tired opening any attachments by dbl-clicking in mail.app?
(we excluded ~/Library/Mail Downloads from local SpotLight to get around it for now) I’m curious if your experiences are similar.

Regards.

chefhomer

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