PowerPoint document locked - possibly reporting wrong user

Question

I recently received a phone call from one of the users saying that her PowerPoint (Office 2007) presentation was locked and under edit by another (she was working remotely off of Citrix server), but the weird part is that the user who was supposedly editing the file was away from her desk with PC shut off, never even heard of that PowerPoint presentation, let alone edit. How is it even possible?

The PowerPoint presentation was on the share drive, people lock their PC when they leave their desks, passwords are not common and forced to be changed every 90 days.

What could possibly cause this?

Answer 1

The information about who is using a document comes from the Office registration settings. I can't say for certain that this is your problem just that I have seen Office applications with invalid in many places with invalid information. My bet is somebody else was editing the document, but just had incorrect name/initials in Office.

On my network I resolved this by creating a login script that reset the Office username at logon time. This is tested for Office 2010, the username/initials might be somewhere in the registry for 2007. The same idea should apply though.

Option Explicit

Dim WindowsDomain
WindowsDomain = "example.org"

Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Dim WshNetwork
Set WshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")

Dim User
Set User = GetObject("WinNT://" & WindowsDomain & "/" & WshNetwork.UserName & ",user")

Dim SplitName
SplitName = Split(User.Fullname, " ", 3)

Dim Initials, NamePart

Initials = ""

For Each NamePart in SplitName
  Initials = Initials & Left(NamePart,1)
Next

Initials = Left(Initials,3)

WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo\UserInitials", Initials, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo\UserName", User.Fullname, "REG_SZ"