Unlocking locked documents

In some very rare instances (we haven’t even been able to recreate it in our test environment, so far), Sharepoint can fail to unlock a locked controlled document.

If this happens you will see a message about this in the Status column.

You can try to unlock a locked document this way:

1. Make sure the document isn’t still open anywhere.

2. Refresh the page (F5).

3. Click the message in the Status column a number of times until the message is closed.

This method can only be used when the document should be unlocked. It can not be used to unlock a document that should be locked, for example when a send for comments workflow or a publish workflow is active.