We have a Windows 2008 r2 file server that has a share that the users are mapped to that is full of PDFs. One department (A) has read/write access and most others (B) just have read access. If someone has one of the files open in either A or B department an A user isn’t able to write to the file.
How can the end users determine who has the file open without me checking that out on the server?
Today this happened and the server showed that a user had about 15 PDFs open but he said he didn’t and hadn’t opened any of them recently and didn’t have Acrobat open. I checked out his computer and saw that he had Windows 7 explorer file preview option enabled which showed a thumbnail of the files. It seems like this feature is prefetching the files to generate the thumbnails. It would seem like a nightmare for file access auditing that the user was opening up so many files.
Am I correct that explorer was prefetching them?
Answer
To answer your last question yes prefetching does inhibit you from updating a pdf directly. I just tested and validated that. As for how to find out if the file is locked that seems trickier. I tested a few powershell scripts but the results came back inconclusive. I am interested if someone has a definitive solution for the file lock monitoring.
I would consider disabling the preview pane from Group Policy angle. Here is an article on how to disable it from the gpedit.exe tool.
http://www.guidingtech.com/12308/permanently-disable-preview-pane-windows-7-explorer/
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : PHLiGHT , Answer Author : organicit
