A

Anonymous

Question

Possible to disable SharePoint check-in/out prompt without disabling all SharePoint integration

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
April 11, 2012
14 replies
68762 views

Hello,

While the article "What's New in Acrobat X, Version 10.1" (http://blogs.adobe.com/pdfitmatters/2011/06/whats-new-in-acrobat-x-version-10-1.html) claims as a new feature the ability to disable the SharePoint check-in/check-out prompt, I cannot find any options for this in the Acrobat X 10.1 application, and furthermore, in response to a user question on this topic, instructions are given to edit a registry key to disable the SharePoint integration features, as below:

"Create a new key “cSharePoint” at “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\(product name)\(version)\FeatureLockDown”

In this key, create a new DWORD Value “bDisableSharePointFeatures”

Set its value to 1"

My question is: Is it possible to disable the SharePoint check-in/check-out prompt only, as suggested by the above article, without disabling all of the SharePoint integration features (as the registry edit would do)?

Many Thanks

This topic has been closed for replies.

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NicoleAhmed

Participant

2022 - acrobat reader DC - I have mapped my sharepoint libraries as drives so am happy to turn off sharepoint features completely in reader (but note denisc96593184 point about versioning and loss of metadata)

I did not want the check out & open dialogue for sharepoint pdfs on a work computer. On a corporate laptop I can only edit registry in HKEY CURRRENT USER - but the following settings have appeared to work for me. Of note this disables sharepoint integration completely (so I no longer have sharepoint in "other file storage" in Home - but this doesn't matter to me as I have mapped my sharepoint & one drive for business as network drives):

1. Open the registry.

2. Go to HKCU\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\(product)\(version)\FeatureLockDown

3. Create a DWORD value called bDisableSharePointFeatures. Set its value to 1.

4. Create a key called cSharePoint.

5. Create a DWORD value called bDisableSharePointFeatures. Set its value to 1.

These registry settings are for Acrobat reader DC - you may have to change product and version to suit your setup

Save following text as a .reg file in notepad - click and run to add these registry chagnes:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown]

"bDisableSharePointFeatures"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown\cSharePoint]

"bDisableSharePointFeatures"=dword:00000001

If you have admin rights you can also add the following

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown]

"bDisableSharePointFeatures"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown\cSharePoint]

"bDisableSharePointFeatures"=dword:00000001

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Nick32041935vi03

Participant

This worked perfectly for my use case, thanks!

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shaunh69052982

Participant

I just want to throw my troubles in here as well. Trying to open an PDF directly from SharePoint, it opens just fine. However, when the same SharePoint library is viewed using file explorer and I attempt to open a PDF, that is when I'm prompted if I wish to OPEN, CheckOUT and OPEN, or CLOSE.

DMcFadd

Participant

Many users don't take issue with Acrobat Reader being integrated with SharePoint. Many organizations use SharePoint; it's hardly the end-user's choice, and SharePoint is arguably superior to flat file network storage. Microsoft products have faults, as do Adobe products; nobody is arguing that and it's hard to please everyone. My longstanding complaint is the imposition of the dialog box itself. While I do edit and comment using Reader and even Acrobat Pro, far and away my most common action is to simply read the information in existing PDF files. When opening dozens of PDF documents over the course of a few hours' research, it is disrupting to be prompted with that annoying dialog box. I say, just open the dang file so I can get my work done and stop pestering me with inane questions! The original poster and many commenters merely ask that the dialog be suppressed. That is the issue at hand: the dialog box itself.

If the user wishes to check out and edit the document, he or she can do so in a twinkling from the File menu: File > SharePoint > Check Out. In Reader 2017, power users can type Alt+FIO and accomplish this. Simple actions which don't interrupt the user's work, unlike pop-up dialogs.

denisc96593184

Participating Frequently

I agree fully.

Thankfully Adobe seems to have gradually been fixing all the things that are broken when SharePoint integration is turned off (such as being able to save a file to a WebDAV URL), so turning off Acrobat's SharePoint integration is the best way to stop these annoying dialogs.

Unfortunately it seems that the new version of Acrobat is now annoying for new reasons, in that it keeps popping up advertisements and pestering you to convert more files while you are not using it ... F* off Adobe, what possessed you to think that advertising your program's features to me in pop-ups was acceptable behaviour, dammit... oh, you took your queues from windows? dammit microsoft... so now we need popup blockers for apps?

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AaronQ

Participant

Just throwing my 2019 hat in on this one. The above 7 years’ worth of commentary echo my issues and diminishing optimism throughout our 2018 Teams/SPO implementation relating to Adobe. Chiefly, thank you to all the admins that have been vocal for so long about the subject bug.

To DMcFadd's point, the user is prompted for checkout/in when they save an unchecked document. So, the user can sleepwalk in to saving properly without even venturing into the File menu. This double prompt is in addition to a forced [Title] meta-data prompt.

"How many clicks does it take to save to the cloud" is an office meme with our Adobe users.

What's worse is how well office apps function with Teams/SPO by comparison. I can understand that from most stake holder viewpoints this all sounds trivial. But for the folks responsible for producing the stream of docs management wants to rapidly approve, using Adobe Sign integration; it is relatively arduous.

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dileepj

Participant

All these years and still this issue persists. Do note that Adobe prompts user even if the doc library has disabled check out, set versioning as "No Versioning". It also highlights the checkout option which tends to push the regular user to click on the checkout option.

If Adobe really wants to enable this feature, at bare minimum, try not to highlight the check out option to mislead the end user!!

denisc96593184

Participating Frequently

Recent revisions of Acrobat seem to have made Acrobat work better with SharePoint when Acrobat's SharePoint integration is disabled. It's now a bit more useful without SharePoint integration enabled, and permits saving to SharePoint webdav paths without returning save failures all the time.

However one BIG problem that remains when SharePoint integration is disabled is that Acrobat clobbers PDF file versioning & custom metadata within SharePoint when saving.

What it's doing when you save a PDF that's in SharePoint is saving to a temporary file (e.g. tempfile.tmp), and then once it's finished, it deletes the old file and then renames the temp file to the old file name. The new file loses all of the custom SharePoint metadata, and has a "0.1" (or 1.0" version) - losing all previous versions.

This is BAD behaviour and harkens back to the 1980s DOS days of file handling.

One way to get around this is using OneDrive - when Acrobat edits local copies of SharePoint files that are synced with OneDrive, then OneDrive handles that versioning properly, and will upload the new file as a next version, instead of deleting the old file, versions and metadata. I've done this when I wanted to do a "recognise text" across a large collection of PDF files, but wanted to retain the original version in document history, rather than lose the original (along with retaining all of the important document metadata attached to each file). Using OneDrive isn't a very good long-term / generic solution though - as it completely fails on complex libraries, and breaks many other things like co-authoring on Office files.

Sunil_Soni

Adobe Employee

Hello Everyone,

I agree, that many users open file only for viewing/reading not for editing and I am sure SharePoint users are aware of Check-in/check-out functionality.

While you try to open SharePoint doc via Acrobat/Reader, it prompts you following three options:

1.) Check Out & Open

2.) Open

3.) Cancel

If you want to open a file for editing, go with option 1, this will stop other users to edit the document while you are making changes to the file, Once you are done with editing, Save it and discard check-out/Check-in the file(these options are shown to user when you try to close the file) which will make file to available for editing to other users.
And if you want only to read/view the document, go with option 2.

So as per your requirement, you can use available options.

Please let us know if required.

-Thanks

Acrobat Team

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jamils37879618

Participant

Thanks for this, but do you know if there is a permanent way of actually disassociating Adobe Acrobat Reader with SharePoint? I've tried the first solution suggested by the creator of this topic, and it works on my computer, but for some reason won't work on my clients' PC. I've recently tried other options like [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mainsoft\Prefs\OpenPDFWithWebDav] @="false", but these do not work on my clients' PC either.

I'm particularly having this issue from opening PDFs through Harmon.ie, which is essentially a mini-SharePoint tucked in your Outlook as a plug-in, but disabling AAR from SharePoint will work the same.

I want to completely disable SharePoint from Adobe; how is this possible?

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Anonymous

This is not an Adobe Acrobat issue. Acrobat has nothing to do with the user being asked about checkouts for editing. The library where you're storing the PDF is configured to require a checkout before editing. There is no way around that. Period. If you want the document to simply open, then you need to setup a SharePoint Library without that setting.

Not Adobe's problem. Ask Microsoft to implement a more granular "checkout for editing" feature. If they did that by file/mime type it would make many people's live very much simpler.

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Anonymous

Trent, I wish that was true. For all libraries (including the libraries NOT using check-in check-out) the popup is shown. What is worse, eventhough the library is configured to NOT use checkout, documents get checked out. Disabling the complete SharePoint integration does prevent users to check documents out... but it also removes the option to save updates (comments etc).

I'm also looking for a solution... Is there anyone of Adobe that can comment on this thread? If the functionality is never going to get in place, I'll start looking for another PDF writer.

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MikePeak8

Participant

We have a similar problem. The goal of our setup is to make the use of writeable PDFs that inexperienced users fill with information. We want the experience for these users to be a simplistic as possible, so asking questions like "Do you want to check-out this document?" and "What are the check-in comments" causes much questioning; especially since these prompts are unnecessary. But we do need SharePoint support for these documents.

There is a way to suppress the check-out prompt if you are willing to do a moderate amount of programming and use the SharePoint client DispEx call; you can force the check-out. But since the final three prompts are encoded completely within Acrobat (1 - "Do you want to save your changes?", 2 - "Do you want to check-in this document?" and 3- "What are your check-in comments?"...all of which we would love to completely supress) we currently have no choices.

Even patching Acrobat would not be an option, because we would have to force everyone to patch their client copy of Acrobat.

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Scadge Productions

Participant

This is an issue when trying to quick print from File Explorer in Windows.

When printing a PDF (or several PDFs in one go) from File Explorer (using right-click -> Print), if the files are located locally or on a file server they will print normally without the need to open Acrobat or FoxitPDF etc. But if the PDFs are in Sharepoint, the "Check out & Open....etc" prompt interrupts the print process and forces the user to open the PDF in Acrobat, for every file selected, and to respond to the prompt on each document before the PDF will print.

So in effect, the quick print option from File Explorer for Sharepoint PDFs no longer works.

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KjetilZ

Participating Frequently

I am having the same problem. Any progress on the case anyone? People are checking documents out in a library were none is supposed to be and it is greatly troublesome.

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Anonymous

At the very least all they need to do is change the order to 'Open' 'Check out & Open' 'Close'

and change the default button to 'Open'

How hard is that I mean really my cat could make that change.

Sadly this is increasingly typical of Adobe, how long has this been going on for, definitely not a listening company.

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Neoassyrian

Participating Frequently

Totally agree.

SharePoint has a lot of users checked out by users just because they opened the document for viewing.

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jacquesm77278122

Participant

Does anyone know if the Adobe dev team is working on an option that one can select to turn off the default behaviour of prompting users for check out and edit?

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dudeness44

Known Participant

Has there been any update on this? I would also like to have some feature in place to stop lots of people who "continually select the default action of checking out, thereby blocking other organisation users"