Unlock Local Workspace Documents

In certain circumstances, an administrator may need to free a document that a particular user has locked because:

  • The user who locked the document is not available and someone else urgently needs to work on the document.

  • The user did not synchronize the document properly.

  • The user wants to continue to work on the document remotely through PowerWeb.

  • The user locked the document in the Local Workspace on an old workstation and needs to work on these documents on a new workstation, but the old workstation is not available anymore.

    In this scenario, if the user tries to unlock the document, they will get an error message.

In these situations, you may need to unlock the document so that the vault copy may be worked on.

Important!

Unlocking a document from a user's Local Workspace can lose changes made to the document by that user while the document resided in the Local Workspace if the document has not yet been synchronized to the vault. The original copy of the document in the vault will be unlocked and considered by Meridian to be the latest revision. For this reason, a document should only be unlocked after it has been synchronized.

Note:

The Revoke Quick Change for Others privilege is required to unlock Local Workspace documents.

ClosedUnlock One Document

To successfully perform this procedure, you need to open the vault using the Meridian Service Account (or your Admin account if you have sufficient workflow privileges).

To unlock one document locked in a user's Local Workspace:

  1. In PowerUser, navigate to the locked document.

  2. Right-click the document and select Show Revisions.

  3. Right-click the last revision, which represents the copy locked in Local Workspace and choose Unlock from Local Workspace.

    A dialog box opens, asking you to confirm your choice.

  4. Click Yes.

ClosedUnlock All Documents

Note:

When the Use Enterprise Server for user management option is enabled as described in Configure the Connection To Meridian Enterprise Server, the Accruent Users and Groups branch mentioned below is hidden because the user accounts and groups are then stored in the Meridian Enterprise Server database instead. You can force the branch to appear anyway by setting the ForceShowUserManagementNode registry value described in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Cyco\AutoManager Meridian\CurrentVersion\AMAdmin.

This is typically done so that an administrator can then use the Unlock Documents command described in Unlock Local Workspace Documents. The branch is visible when the user accounts and groups are stored in the Meridian user database by default.

To unlock all documents that are locked in a user's Local Workspace for one vault:

  1. In the Meridian Enterprise Administrator, expand Accruent Users and Groups in the left pane and click Users.

  2. In the user list, click the name of the user for which you want to unlock documents.

  3. On the Action menu, point to All Tasks and click Unlock Documents.

    The Unlock Documents dialog box appears.

  4. Read and understand the warning.

    Proceeding to unlock documents cannot be undone.

  5. In the vault list, click the name of the vault name for which you want to unlock documents.

  6. Confirm that the user name is correct.

    To see how many documents are locked by the selected user:

    1. Click Check.

      The quantity appears in a dialog box.

    2. Click OK.

  7. If you are certain that you want to unlock the documents, click Finish.

    A dialog box shows the results of the command.

    The next time that the user who had the documents locked logs on, they will be shown a Local Workspace conflict message stating This file is modified outside the vault. For information on resolving Local Workspace conflicts, refer to Resolve Local Workspace Conflicts.

2022 R2